George W Bush said yesterday he was confident that with the right intelligence, the US and Pakistan governments could take out al Qaeda leaders, and declined to rule out consulting Pakistan first before ordering US forces to act.

"With real actionable intelligence, we will get the job done," said the US president.

He was asked whether he would wait for permission from General Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, before committing the US military to move on "actionable intelligence" as to the whereabouts of terrorist leaders in Pakistan. He did not answer directly.

Bush was at the presidential retreat for two days of meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. They held talks on the rash of crises confronting Aghanistan: civilian killings, a booming drug trade and the brazen resurgence of the Taliban.

Karzai said he and Musharraf, who are meeting this week in the Afghan capital of Kabul, would discuss how to tackle the problem of lawlessness and extremists hideouts along Pakistan's border area with his country.

The issue of a theoretical US military incursion into Pakistan is a sensitive one. Bush has said before that he would order the US to act inside the Muslim-majority country if there were firm intelligence on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden or other terrorist leaders.

Bin Laden, the mastermind of the September 11,terrorist attacks against the United States in 2001, is believed to be living in the tribal border region of Pakistan. His ability to avoid capture remains a massive source of frustration for US-led forces and a political sore spot for Bush.

Musharraf, however, has objected to any unilateral action by Washington.

At the weekend, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates was equally careful in describing how US officials would handle such a situation.

"I think we would not act without telling Musharraf what we were planning to do," he said during a television interview.

Pakistan yesterday denied al Qaeda or the Taliban had safe havens in its territory, and said new laws tying American aid to Islamabad's performance in fighting militants threatened to harm security co-operation between the two countries.

Pakistani officials have grown increasingly annoyed at a wave of recent criticism from Washington and US presidential candidates that has centred around the assertion that al Qaeda has regrouped in the tribal regions along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.

"There is no al Qaeda or Taliban safe haven in Pakistan," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam said at a weekly briefing yesterday.

Pakistan has received billions in American aid since joining the United States in the war on terror in late 2001 and has deployed about 90,000 troops to the border region near Afghanistan.

However, the US has strongly criticised a September 2006 peace deal with pro-Taliban militants that reduced the Pakistan army's presence in restive North Waziristan.

The US National Intelligence Estimate last month indicated that al Qaeda may be regrouping in the region because the peace deal allowed more freedom for militants to operate.

In Nevada, meanwhile, US Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama stood by comments in which he said that he would use military force in Pakistan if necessary to root out terrorists.

"There was no mistake there," he said of his remarks last week, which prompted an anti-US protest in Pakistan and attacks from both Democrats and Republicans.

"I made a simple proposition that I'd like anybody here to challenge me on," he told a rural audience.

The first-term senator said he had been surprised by the strong reaction.

"If we had actionable intelligence in terms of taking terrorists out and we couldn't get the government of Pakistan to act, we should act. That doesn't seem to me to be a controversial statement," he said.

The government of Pakistan last week branded Obama's comment "irresponsible" and protesters in Islamabad burned an American flag.