Obama has no scheduled visit to Pakistan: official

WASHINGTON: The White House rowed back Sunday on earlier plans for US President Barack Obama to visit Pakistan this year, as the diplomatic fallout from the killing of Osama bin Laden intensified.

Last October, Obama committed himself to visiting Pakistan in 2011, but those plans now appear to be in flux as relations become increasingly strained by suspicions over who in Islamabad knew what about bin Laden's whereabouts.

"There is not a visit on his schedule at this point to go to Pakistan," White House National Security Advisor Tom Donilon told NBC's "Meet The Press" program.

Obama has said bin Laden, who was killed by US commandos in a garrison town just two hours drive from Islamabad, must have had "some sort of support network" but it was not clear if the Pakistani government was involved.

For a decade, Islamabad has been America's wary Afghan war ally, despite widespread public opposition and militant bomb attacks across the nuclear-armed country that have killed several thousand people.

Pakistan has never been fully trusted by either Kabul or Washington, which accuse its powerful military of fostering the Afghan Taliban it spawned during the 1980s resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. (AFP)