Osama had ISI support network in Pakistan, says Obama

Raising questions about the possibility that “some people inside of government” in Pakistan may have been involved in providing support structure for the slain terrorist Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, President Barack Obama has called for investigations both by Pakistan and US into it.

“We don’t know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that’s something that we have to investigate and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate,” he told the ‘60 Minutes’ show on ‘CBS News’ in his first interview after bin Laden’s death.

“We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan. But we don’t know who or what that support network was,” Obama said.

His comments came as his top security adviser said there was no evidence so far that the Pakistan Government knew about the Al-Qaida chief’s presence in the country. “We have already communicated to them, and they have indicated they have a profound interest in finding out what kinds of support networks bin Laden might have had.

“But these are questions that we’re not gonna be able to answer three or four days after the event. It’s gonna take some time for us to be able to exploit the intelligence that we were able to gather on site,” Obama said.

Refraining from making any adverse comment on Pakistan given that stakes are high right now, Obama said he had to be careful about sources and methods and how America operates and how it pieced together this intelligence, because they were still be going after terrorists in the future.

“What I can say is that Pakistan, since 9/11, has been a strong counterterrorism partner with us. There have been times where we’ve had disagreements. There have been times where we wanted to push harder, and for various concerns, they might have hesitated. And those differences are real. And they’ll continue,” he said.

“But the fact of the matter is, is that we’ve been able to kill more terrorists on Pakistani soil than just about any place else. We could not have done that without Pakistani cooperation.

“And I think that this will be an important moment in which Pakistan and the United States gets together and say, ‘All right, we’ve gotten bin Laden, but we’ve got more work to do. And are there ways for us to work more effectively together than we have in the past?’,” he said.

“And that’s gonna be important for our national security. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t gonna be times where we’re gonna be frustrated with Pakistanis,” he said.