WASHINGTON, May 22: US President Barack Obama has said he would order another covert military raid in Pakistan like the one that killed Osama bin Laden if another militant leader was found in the country.

In an interview to BBC broadcast on Sunday, President Obama made it clear that while he respected Pakistan’s sovereignty, his main job was to protect his own country and he would not hesitate in doing so.

Asked what he would do if one of Al Qaeda’s top leaders, or the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, was tracked down to a location in Pakistan or another sovereign territory, he said the US would take unilateral action if required.

“Our job is to secure the United States,” he said. “We are very respectful of the sovereignty of Pakistan. But we cannot allow someone who is actively planning to kill our people or our allies’ people.”

President Obama made it clear that he was focused on other concerns. “We can’t allow those kinds of active plans to come to fruition without us taking some action,” he said.

Also, last week White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said while the US took Pakistan’s complaints seriously, it would not apologise over the May 2 attack.

President Obama went a step ahead and said he hoped the raid would be “a wake-up call where we start seeing a more effective cooperative relationship” with Pakistan.

Mr Obama also underlined the general feeling in America that Bin Laden must have had a strong support network in Pakistan to have lived there undetected for so long: “What we know is that for him to have been there for five or six years probably required some sort of support external to the compound,” he said.

But Mr Obama did leave some room for Pakistani officials to explain their position, saying that he did not know whether that support was “non-governmental, governmental, a broad network, or a handful of individuals”. Those were the “things that we are investigating, but we’re also asking the Pakistanis to investigate”, he added.

Pakistan denies official involvement and has launched inquiries to determine what and who allowed Bin Laden to hide in Abbottabad for six years. Islamabad has promised to share the findings with Washington.

Last week, the United States sent its special envoy Marc Grossman and a senior CIA official to Islamabad to discuss these and other issues as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the future of US-Pakistan relations depended on these talks.

In his interview to BBC, President Obama said he had taken a “calculated risk” in launching the Bin Laden raid, a triumph that could easily have ended in disaster. He said the US SEAL team was exceptionally well prepared, “but there’s no doubt that that was as long a 40 minutes as I care to experience during my presidency”.