US Diplomat Alleges Some Al Qaeda Leaders Are In Quetta, Pakistan

From Dawn:

PESHAWAR: A senior US diplomat on Friday went a step further than restating Washington’s assertion about the presence of Taliban shura in Quetta and insisted that some Al Qaeda leadership could also be there.

‘Our intelligence shows that some of the Al Qaeda leadership is in Pakistan,’ Candace Putnam, the US consul-general in Peshawar told a media roundtable here.

‘I don’t know where Osama bin Laden is on any given day, but we do know that some of the leadership is sitting in Quetta and that they travel back and forth from Afghanistan to Pakistan,’ she said.

‘We know that they are there. And I think your government also knows this. Whether they want to say this in public or not but I think they know they are there,’ she added.

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My Comment: The Americans are getting frustrated with Pakistani unwillingness to clamp down on Al Qaeda and Afghan-Taliban groups in Pakistan. I expect these comments to increase as more U.S. soldiers start to surge into Afghanistan.