Qaeda feels unsafe near Pakistan border: CIA chief

By Randall Mikkelsen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda leaders no longer feel safe in Afghan-Pakistan border areas, where they face heavy U.S. and Pakistani pressure and their local welcome has worn out, CIA chief Michael Hayden said on Thursday.

Hayden's comments to reporters as he prepares to leave his post underscored a growing Bush administration confidence that al Qaeda's leadership has been crippled, partly by a military campaign that Washington does not acknowledge.

Hayden also said in the wide-ranging discussion he believed Iran was nearing a decision on whether to proceed with development of a nuclear weapon.

He stood by his defense of CIA waterboarding and said that regardless of whether the agency's harsh interrogations will be judged worth the widespread condemnation, they worked.

"The agency did none of this out of enthusiasm. It did it out of duty, and it did it with the best legal advice," he said. "I am convinced that the program got the maximum amount of information. ... I just can't conceive of any other way."

Hayden said a disappointment of his 2 1/2-year term was that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was still at large. But he said bin Laden and top lieutenants were no longer secure in the Pakistan mountain hide-outs believed to be hiding them.

"The great danger was that -- I'm going to use a little euphemism here -- the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan was a safe haven for al Qaeda," Hayden said. "It is my belief that the senior leadership of al Qaeda today believes that it is neither safe, nor a haven. That is a big deal in defending the United States."

An audio message from bin Laden this week may have been intended in part simply to show he was still alive, Hayden suggested.

"What we and our Pakistani allies have been able to do have changed the equation there," he said. U.S. forces in Afghanistan launched about 30 missile strikes in Pakistan in 2008, according to a Reuters tally.

The U.S. government does not acknowledge the strikes, but eight senior al Qaeda leaders have died in the region since July, a U.S. counterterrorism official said this week.

Pakistan has denounced the raids as violations of territorial sovereignty. But Pakistani Ambassador Husain Haqqani said in Washington that Pakistani military cooperation had begun reducing militant infiltration into Afghanistan.

"Instead, now there is a reverse infiltration of Taliban and jihadis from Afghanistan coming into Pakistan to try and protect bases," in tribal areas," Haqqani told a think tank in Washington.

Residents in the border areas have also begun to make al Qaeda feel unwelcome, Hayden said.

'HE'S HIDING'

Hayden said it was likely that bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, would be caught before the al Qaeda leader, because Zawahri was more active and more involved in operations.