NEW YORK, June 30: Sharp policy disagreements and turf battles between American counter-terrorism agencies have held up Bush administration’s secret plan to operate inside Pakistan’s tribal areas, the New York Times reported on Monday.

It quoted a senior Defence Department official as saying there was “mounting frustration” in the Pentagon at the continued delay in deployment of special operations teams into Pakistan’s tribal regions where senior Al Qaeda operatives are thought to be hiding.

The new plan, outlined in a highly classified Pentagon order, was intended to eliminate some of those turf battles. And it was meant to pave a smoother path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington’s risk-averse attitude towards special operations missions inside Pakistan.

They also argue that catching Bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior lieutenants alive.

The Times report, based on more than four dozen interviews in the US and Pakistan, said Al Qaeda’s new safe haven in Pakistan was in part due to the administration’s accommodation to President Musharraf. It was also a story, the report concluded, of infighting between US intelligence agencies and shifting White House priorities from counter-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the war in Iraq.

The newspaper quoted a retired CIA officer as saying that Al Qaeda training compounds in Pakistan now host as many as 2,000 local and foreign militants. The level of expertise among CIA officers in the region was also a drag on operations, the report said

Publicly, senior American and Pakistani officials have said that the creation of an Al Qaeda haven in the tribal areas was in many ways inevitable — that the lawless badlands where ethnic Pashtun tribes have resisted government control for centuries were a natural place for a dispirited terrorism network to find refuge.

The American and Pakistani officials also blame a disastrous ceasefire brokered between the Pakistani government and militants in 2006.

According to the Times, American intelligence officials say that the Al Qaeda hunt in Pakistan, code-named Operation Cannonball by the CIA in 2006, was often undermined by bitter disagreements within the Bush administration and within the CIA, including about whether American commandos should launch ground raids inside the tribal areas.