PTI
Washington, Apr 8: Taliban and al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are hiding in Pakistan's tribal areas, where the US is fighting a war on terror, US Vice President Joe Biden has said.
"In the FATA, the western part of Pakistan in the mountains on the Afghan border, that is a war on terror. That's where al-Qaida lives. That's where bin Laden is. That's where the most radicalized part of the Taliban is," Biden told CNN in an interview.
"The situation we have as it relates to problems that exist in other parts of the world, they aren't all related to terror," he said in response to a question if the Obama administration has stopped use of the phrase "global war on terror".
Biden asserted there is a war on terror. "Terror is a legitimate threat. It is a threat that comes from al-Qaida and those organisations that have morphed off of al-Qaida, but there are other interests we have beyond merely - for example, the situation in the Middle East is not a global war on terror. But it matters to us mightily whether or not we end up with an accommodation between the Israelis and the Palestinians," he said.
The vice president said Obama administration is concerned that al-Qaida has been able to reconstitute itself under the Bush administration in the mountain regions on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"Up till now there has been no targeted policy that has as its goal the elimination of that element of extremism in the world directed at the United States of America," he said.
However, Biden observed under the rubric of a global war on terror, the Obama administration has ended up a series of policies that made no sense and made the US weaker, in his view and that of Obama.
"And so, what we decided to do is look at things in their discrete - as discrete problems. Here you have a situation. It is not a global war on terror in Iraq. The problem we have in Iraq now is leaving behind a government where Sunnis, Kurds and Shia get along, where they can share power and be stable, not a threat to their neighbours and secure in their own boundaries," he argued.