The US has no ``definitive evidence'' that Pakistan knew Osama bin Laden had been living in the compound where a Navy SEALs assault team killed him, but the Pakistanis must now show convincingly their commitment to defeating the al Qaida terrorist network, a senior Pentagon official said Thursday.
Michele Flournoy, the top policy aide to Defence Secretary Robert Gates, told reporters that the Pakistani government should, for example, help the US exploit the materials the SEALs collected inside bin Laden's lair during their raid on Monday. Flournoy was the first Pentagon official to comment on-the-record about the raid. She offered no new details about it, but said it dealt ``a very severe blow'' to al Qaida and offers incentive for Pakistan to cooperate more fully in defeating the terrorist network.
``This is a real moment of opportunity for us in terms of making further gains against al Qaida,'' she said. Questions about whether Pakistan knew of bin Laden's whereabouts, and may even have helped hide him, arose immediately after Monday's raid. Flournoy said US officials have pressed Pakistan for more details about the matter.
``We are still talking with the Pakistanis and trying to understand what they did know, what they didn't know,'' she said. ``We do not have any definitive evidence at this point that they did know that Osama bin Laden was at this compound.'' Pressed for more detail about what evidence the US might have about Pakistani knowledge of bin Laden's whereabouts prior to the raid, Flournoy declined to elaborate, saying that kind of information would have to come from the CIA, which led the hunt for bin Laden and oversaw Monday's raid.
Flournoy, the under-secretary of defence for policy, said she held previously scheduled talks at the Pentagon on Monday, just hours after the raid was announced, with a Pakistani government delegation. In that session and follow-up talks on Tuesday, Flournoy said she made clear that members of Congress even those who have been supporters of increased co-operation with Pakistan will be increasingly sceptical about the wisdom of continuing to provide billions of dollars in US aid.
Pakistan must take ``very concrete and visible steps to show their co-operation as a counterterrorism partner,'' she said, ``because I do think that Congress will have to be convinced to sustain both civilian and military assistance to Pakistan.'' She added that the Obama administration still intends to keep close ties to Pakistan, even as it presses the Pakistanis for more information about bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad, the military garrison town a few dozen miles from Islamabad, the capital.
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