Defiant Gilani praises ISI,blames US; Pak outs CIA officer again

Gilani’s statement was expected to give an accounting of what Pakistan knew about bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan,but instead centred on how the raid by the US was a breach of Pakistani sovereignty. He warned that a repeat,to capture other high profile terrorists,could be met with “full force”.

Gilani repeated his assertion that bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan was an intelligence failure of the “whole world”,and said a senior general — adjutant general Lt Gen. Javed Iqbal,a close aide to army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani — would conduct an inquiry into the raid that killed bin Laden.

He gave no timeline of when the inquiry would be completed or who would participate in it.

In response to statements by officials in the Obama administration that elements in the ISI knew about bin Laden’s hiding place and may have supported him,Gilani said it was “disingenuous” for anyone to blame the ISI or the army of being “in cahoots” with the al-Qaeda leader.

ISI chief Lt Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha and Gen. Kayani have been described by Pakistani officials as seething over the US raid,and the failure of the Obama administration to inform Pakistan in advance.

In apparent retaliation,the ISI appeared to have told a conservative Pakistani daily,The Nation,the name of the CIA station chief who is posted at the US embassy in Islamabad. A misspelled version of the station chief¿s name appeared in the Saturday edition of the paper.

In December,the prior CIA station chief had to leave Pakistan after he was publicly identified in a legal complaint sent to the Pakistani police by the family of victims of the American drone campaign. At the time,the US had said it believed that the ISI had deliberately made the name public.

The new station chief was responsible for directing a large part of the bin Laden operation,including supervision of a CIA safe house from which operatives spied on his compound in Abbottabad. The CIA station chief was not expected to leave Pakistan as a result of his cover being blown,US officials said.

Gilani gave a spirited defence of the ISI,which he described as Pakistan’s “national asset”.

“No other country in the world and no other security agency has done so much to interdict al-Qaeda than the ISI and our armed forces,” he said. But he did not explain how al-Qaeda¿s leader had managed to remain sequestered for five years in the garrison city of Abbottabad.

Gilani¿s account of the history of al-Qaeda essentially blamed the US for allowing Islamic militants to take hold in Pakistan. “We didn’t invite Osama bin Laden to Pakistan or Afghanistan,” he said.

The US,Gilani said,had encouraged the Islamic militants that fought against the Soviet Union to disperse into Pakistan after that war was over in the late 1980s. And,he said,the bombings of al-Qaeda militants at Tora Bora after 9/11 “resulted in the dispersal of al-Qaeda”.

“We had cautioned international forces on a flawed military campaign,¿ Gilani said.

A joint session of parliament on May 13 would be given a briefing by the military,the prime minister said.