Only after the SEAL team landed in Afghanistan were U.S. officials convinced that they had indeed succeeded, he said. Obama described walking out of the Situation Room and telling aides, “We got him.”
Eyes on Pakistan
The full episode featuring President Obama's interview on CBS's 60 Minutes, which aired Sunday night.
Q&A: Can we trust Pakistan?
"There is no doubt that the Pakistanis will have an investigation, but don't expect that it will be 'legitimate' in the way you might like."
CFR fellow Daniel Markey
The Hunt for Osama bin Laden
The president acknowledged surprise at learning that bin Laden had remained hidden in Pakistan since 2005 without being discovered by the country’s security officials. He said White House officials believed there had to be “some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan,” though it was unclear who or what that support network was.
“We don’t know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government,” he said, “and that’s something that we have to investigate, and more importantly the Pakistani government has to investigate.”
National security adviser Thomas E. Donilon said Pakistan remains a critical partner in battling al-Qaeda, despite new strains in the relationship a week after the raid in Abbottabad. But he acknowledged that Pakistani officials have not granted Americans access to important information gathered since the raid or allowed interviews with bin Laden family members now in Pakistan’s custody.
“We’ve asked for access, obviously, to those folks,” Donilon said on ABC’s “This Week,” one of four television news shows he visited Sunday.
A Pakistani intelligence official said Sunday that his government needed permission from the wives’ home countries before Pakistan could allow U.S. officials to question them. One of the wives is from Yemen; the official said he did not know the other wives’ nationalities.
Donilon also weighed in on whether senior Pakistani officials knew of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad or perhaps even supported the al-Qaeda leader materially.
“As I sit here with you, I don’t have any information that would indicate foreknowledge by the political military or intelligence leadership in Pakistan,” Donilon said.
Other U.S. officials and congressional leaders in recent days have suggested that Pakistani officials must have known of bin Laden’s presence or else were grossly incompetent in failing to notice his nearly six-year presence in a town that is home to one of the country’s premier military academies.
Donilon said questions about how bin Laden managed to live peacefully in Pakistan for so long “are being raised quite aggressively in Pakistan,” but he said Islamabad remains “an essential partner of ours in the war against al-Qaeda” and other terrorist groups.
“This is an important relationship with the United States, so we need to assess this . . . in a cool and calm way,” he told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour.
Others echoed Donilon’s efforts to cool the anti-Pakistan rhetoric in Washington. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Pakistan was helpful in the capture of bin Laden, even though the White House chose not to notify Islamabad of the raid in Abbottabad until after it ended.
“Even in the getting of Osama bin Laden, the Pakistanis were helpful,” Kerry said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “We have people on the ground in Pakistan because they allow us to have them. We actually worked with them on certain parts of the intelligence that helped to lead to him.”
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