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Pakistani security
officials reacted with skepticism on Sunday to a U.S. assertion that
Osama bin Laden was actively engaged in directing his far-flung network
from his compound in Abbottabad where he was killed on May 2.

Washington said on
Saturday that, based on a trove of documents and computer equipment
seized in the raid, bin Laden’s hideout north of Islamabad was an
“active command and control center” for al Qaeda where he was involved
in plotting future attacks on the United States.

“It sounds ridiculous,” said a senior intelligence official. “It doesn’t sound like he was running a terror network.”

Pakistan, heavily
dependent on billions of dollars in U.S. aid, is under intense pressure
to explain how the al Qaeda leader could have spent so many years
undetected just a few hours’ drive from its intelligence headquarters
in the capital.

Suspicion has
deepened that Pakistan’s pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)
spy agency, which has a long history of contacts with militant groups,
may have had ties with bin Laden — or that at least some of its agents
did. The agency has been described as a state within a state.

Pakistan has
dismissed such suggestions and says it has paid the highest price in
human life and money supporting the U.S. war on militancy launched
after bin Laden’s followers staged the September 11, 2001, attacks on
America.

The Obama administration

has seen no
evidence Pakistan’s government knew bin Laden was living in that
country before his killing, the U.S. national security adviser said on
Sunday.

Prime Minister
Yusuf Raza Gilani is scheduled to “take the nation into confidence” in
parliament on Monday, his first statement to the people more than a
week after the incident embarrassed the country.

Pakistani officials
said the fact that there was no internet connection or even phone line
into the compound where the world’s most-wanted man was

hiding raised doubts about his centrality to al Qaeda.

Analysts have long
maintained that, years before bin Laden’s death, al Qaeda had
fragmented into a decentralized group that operated tactically without
him.

“It’s bullshit,”
said a senior Pakistani security official, when quizzed on a U.S.
intelligence official’s assertion that bin Laden had been “active in
operational planning and in driving tactical decisions” of the Islamist
militant group from his secret home in the town of Abbottabad.

On Saturday, the
White House released five video clips of bin Laden taken from the
compound, most of them showing the al Qaeda leader, his beard dyed
black, evidently rehearsing the videotaped speeches he sometimes
distributed to his followers.

None of the videos was released with sound. A U.S. intelligence
official said it had been removed because the United States did not
want to transmit bin Laden’s propaganda. But he said they contained the
usual criticism of the United States as well as capitalism.