No evidence of ISI, Pak Army links to Osama: US

There is no evidence so far that anybody in a senior position in Pakistan Army or the Inter-Services Intelligence had any knowledge about the presence of Osama bin Laden at a safe house in an Islamabad suburb, a top Pentagon official has said.

"I'm privy now to an awful lot of what we've seen as a result of what he had in his, where he was living, and I just haven't seen anything yet that would confirm that anybody in a senior position had any idea he was there," Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Charlie Rose show in an interview on Tuesday.

"I just haven't seen anything that would lead me to believe, any evidence that the ISI knew about it, that the Pak military knew about it," he said.

The top Pentagon official said that he has seen evidence that bin Laden lived at the Abbottabad compound for five years. He said the US raid on bin Laden's safe house was the culmination of the focus that America had put on finding and capturing or killing the top Al Qaeda leadership

"When we went in, certainly he's been the number one target for us for a long time, but when we went in, the status of the Al Qaeda has been significantly damaged over the course of the last two or three years," he said.

"So they're a much different organisation than they were when President Barack Obama came in. But we have been focused on this for a decade."

"This was the best -- certainly I'd ever seen -- action between the Central Investigation Agency and the Pentagon. And there were other agencies involved as well," he said.

Mullen said the US has brought as much pressure and discussion as it could on Pakistan to take action to eliminate that threat. "That's just part of what we're going through with them right now. From an Al Qaeda standpoint, what the Pakistan leadership tells me -- the military leadership -- is that they don't want them there either," he said.