Washington: Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, whose country's Army is hunting for Osama bin Laden, has said the search for the al-Qaeda leader has gone cold, with no recent intelligence indicating where he and his top lieutenants are hiding.

More than three years after al-Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon killed almost 3,000 people, Musharraf insisted in an interview to 'The Washington Post' that Pakistani forces are still aggressively pursuing the world's most notorious terrorist.

But, he acknowledged that recent security force operations and interrogations have been able to determine only one fact -- that bin Laden is still alive.

"He is alive, but more than that, where he is, no, it'll be just a guess and it won't have much basis," Musharraf told the Post.

Pressed on whether the trail had gone cold, he said, "Yes, if you mean we don't know, from that point of view, we don't know where he is."

The US shares major responsibility, Musharraf suggested, because the US-led coalition does not have enough troops in Afghanistan, which has left "voids."

The US and its allies need to expedite training and expansion of the new Afghan Army as the only viable alternative, he said.

Challenges in Afghanistan would be better dealt with "if the Afghan national Army is raised faster, in more strength, so that they can reach out to fill these voids that I am talking about, where US forces or coalition forces are not there," he said.

The hunt for al-Qaeda members, including top lieutenants of Osama, is also foundering because of the diffuse array of groups under its umbrella. Pakistani forces are usually not even certain who or what factions they are pursuing in the treacherous tribal regions along its border with Afghanistan, Musharraf said.

"Now, when we operate in many areas, we don't know who we are operating against and suddenly we find out that, okay, we've got (or) we've killed so-and-so," Musharraf said. Sometimes Pakistani forces just "bump into them," he added.

In a raid, Pakistani forces captured the mastermind behind the month-long seizure of 3 UN workers in Afghanistan, "but we didn't know we were operating against him," he said.

In another recent raid on an unidentified target, Pakistani troops killed a member of a Chinese East Turkistan Islamic Movement, a group of Uighur Muslims challenging Chinese control over an area around Xinjiang, he said.

The Pakistani leader also denied reports that his troops were withdrawing from south Waziristan, a tense tribal area along the mountainous border that was considered a possible hiding place for bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawahri.

Pakistan, he said, has ordered a "relocation" and tactical shift of its forces now that extremists have been flushed out of five valleys in south Waziristan and forced into remote mountains where they will be pursued by Pakistan's helicopter-borne Special Operations Task Force. As many as 8,000 troops have been deployed there in recent operations to nab extremists who cross from Afghanistan or use the border.

Pakistan's military operation, combined with a political push to win cooperation from the local population, Musharraf said, has been a recent victory. "They're on the run now," he claimed.