Monday, April 7, 2014

Analyst: Pakistan knows where al-Zawahiri is

Fareed speaks with Carlotta Gall, ‘New York Times’ reporter and author of ‘The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014’, about the future of Afghanistan.
What do you think Pakistan's role will be once we start pulling out? They're going to try to fill that vacuum, probably.
I think it's already clear that they're determined to see a resurgence of the Taliban. They're supporting them. They're encouraging them. There's been a spate of attacks. Just now, I was just in Kabul two days ago. We had a suicide bombing almost every day that I was there in the last week. And that's all coming from Pakistan. The madrassas have closed, you know, and they're all going in.
And that's clearly what needs to be looked at very strongly, because the Pakistanis have not finished their war. And what they want is, through a proxy force, to dominate affairs in Afghanistan. And they're still going to continue...
And that proxy force is the Taliban, for the Pakistanis?
The Taliban, yes, and actually al Qaeda has shown there they were protecting and hiding bin Laden. And al-Zawahiri, who's taken over from bin Laden, is head of al Qaeda, he's in Pakistan. And I have a passage in the book which shows that they certainly, in 2005, they were hiding him, the Pakistani government.
Do you think the Pakistani government knows where Zawahiri, the head of al Qaeda, is? Yes. Absolutely.

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