US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said today that Pakistan squandered opportunities over the years to kill or capture leaders of the al-Qaeda terrorist network believed to be responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.
While US officials have said they believe Osama bin Laden and senior lieutenants have been hiding in the rugged terrain along the border with Afghanistan, Ms Clinton's unusually blunt comments went further as she suggested that Pakistan's government has done too little to act against al-Qaeda's top echelon.
"I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to," Clinton said in an interview with Pakistani journalists in Lahore today. "Maybe that's the case. Maybe they're not gettable. I don't know."
A Pakistani journalist had asked Clinton why the fight against terrorism seemed to put Pakistan at the center and why other countries couldn't do more. Ms Clinton noted that al-Qaeda has launched attacks on Indonesia, the Philippines and many other countries over the years.
"So the world has an interest in seeing the capture and killing of the people who are the masterminds of this terrorist syndicate. As far as we know, they are in Pakistan."
With the country reeling from yesterday's devastating bombing that killed at least 105 people in Peshawar, Ms Clinton also engaged in an intense give-and-take with students at the Government College of Lahore. She insisted that inaction by the government would have ceded ground to terrorists.
"If you want to see your territory shrink, that's your choice," she said, adding that she believed it would be a bad choice.
Richard Holbrooke, the special US representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters that Ms Clinton planned to meet later today with the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to get an update on the offensive that began this month against Taliban forces in a portion of the tribal areas near the Afghan border.
"We want to encourage them," Holbrooke said. "She wants to get a first-hand account of the military situation."