Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has said his troops were not hunting for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but were more focussed on battling the Taliban and dismissed as “pinpricks” the rising militant attacks in his country.“The 1,00,000 troops that we are using to fight terrorists. are not going around trying to locate Osama bin Laden and Zawahiri, frankly,” Musharraf said at a press conference at the French Institute for International Relations in Paris on Wednesday.That bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are still at large “doesn’t mean much”, said Musharraf, who is in France on the second leg of his four-nation European tour. The two most-wanted men are believed to be hiding somewhere in the Pakistan’s tribal areas.“They are operating against terrorists, and in the process, if we get them, we will deal with them, certainly,” Musharraf said, suggesting it was more important to battle the Taliban and that the al-Qaeda was less of a threat to his country.Musharraf stressed that the remnants of the former Taliban regime of Afghanistan are the “more serious issue, for the US and Pakistan”.Rejecting suggestions that the violence in the border areas was a sign of a resurgent Taliban, he said: “These are pinpricks that they keep doing and we have to manage all of that.”
