Washington ? Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said Saturday that the search for Osama bin Laden has gone completely cold, with no recent intelligence indicating where he and his lieutenants are hiding.

More than three years after al-Qaida’s attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon killed almost 3,000 people, Musharraf insisted that Pakistani forces were still aggressively pursuing the world’s most notorious terrorist. But he acknowledged that recent security force operations and interrogations had 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 said in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters. 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.”

Bush defended the visiting Musharraf, who has been faulted by some for uneven cooperation in the president’s war on terror, as a “courageous leader” who has risked assassination for his crackdown on al-Qaida.

The Oval Office meeting came just days after Pakistan’s army said it was pulling out of one important area along the border. Still, Bush had nothing but praise for Pakistan and Musharraf as being critical to the search and the overall fight against terrorism.

“His army has been incredibly active and very brave in southern Waziristan flushing out an enemy that had thought they had found safe haven,” Bush said.

The United States shares major responsibility, Musharraf suggested, because the U.S.-led coalition does not have enough troops in Afghanistan, which has left “voids.” The United States and its allies need to expedite training and expansion of the new Afghan army as the only viable alternative, he said.

Challenges 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 U.S. forces or coalition forces are not there,” he said.