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Posted by eadposting - -

Pakistan WASHINGTON: Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari on Monday turned down accusations against the country that it did not do enough to track down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

"Although the events of Sunday were not a joint operation, a decade of cooperation and partnership between the United States and Pakistan led up to the elimination of Osama bin Laden as a continuing threat to the civilized world," Zardari said in an op-ed for The Washington Post.

Underneath a headline reading "Pakistan did its part," he added: "we in Pakistan take some satisfaction that our early assistance in identifying an al Qaeda courier ultimately led to this day."

"He was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone," Zardari wrote.

President Zardari, writing in the US daily newspaper, also dismissed any notion that Pakistan was failing to take action against militants on its territory.

Zardari said the whereabouts of the al Qaeda leader were not known to the Pakistani authorities.

"He was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be, but now he is gone," he wrote.

The Pakistani leader said it was simply untrue to suggest that his country, as badly hit as any by bin Laden and his militants with 30,000 civilian deaths, was sluggish or unwilling to track down activists.

"Some in the US press have suggested that Pakistan lacked vitality in its pursuit of terrorism or, worse yet, that we were disingenuous and actually protected the terrorists we claimed to be pursuing," he wrote.

"Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn't reflect fact. Pakistan had as much reason to despise al Qaeda as any nation. The war on terrorism is as much Pakistan's war as it is America's. And though it may have started with bin Laden, the forces of modernity remain under serious threat."