Negroponte nails Pakistan for providing a "secure hideout" to al Qaeda

The BBC reports that National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said that al Qaeda has found a safe haven in Pakistan and is strengthening its ties across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. According to the BBC, this is the first time the U.S. has so precisely specified where it believes the al Qaeda leadership is since U.S.-led forces destroyed the group's camps in Afghanistan in 2001.

Negroponte told a Senate committee in his annual threat assessment that al-Qaeda still "poses the greatest threat to US interests." He added in his written testimony: "They are cultivating stronger operational connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders' secure hideout in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

"We have captured or killed numerous senior al-Qaeda operatives, but al-Qaeda's core elements are resilient. They continue to plot attacks against our homeland and other targets with the objective of inflicting mass casualties," he went on to say.

"Pakistan is our partner in the war on terror and has captured several al-Qaeda leaders. However, it is also a major source of Islamic extremism," he added.

Pakistani officials denied that Pakistan is in any way complicit in the finding. "Pakistan does not provide a secure hideout to al-Qaeda or any terrorist group," a Pakistani foreign office spokeswoman said. "In fact the only country that has been instrumental in breaking the back of al-Qaeda is Pakistan."

Al Qaeda is widely believed to be hiding out in Pakistan's tribal areas on the Afghan border. These areas have never really been under the control of the central government.

Update: The Washington Post reports from Pakistan that "the bodies of two dozen Islamic insurgents killed in a clash with NATO and Afghan army forces near the border with Pakistan were sent back Friday to Pakistan, where Taliban leaders asked that they be given funerals as 'martyrs,' according to news reports here."

As the Post goes on to say, "The reports appeared to bolster Afghan and U.S. assertions, repeatedly denied by Pakistani officials, that Pakistan's tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan have provided a haven for Islamic militia groups seeking to destabilize the Western-backed government of Afghanistan."