Wolfowitz says bin Laden's power has been sapped but U.S.-led manhunt could take months

By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer

WASHINGTON – The U.S.-led war on terrorism has eroded Osama bin Laden's authority as a terrorist leader, fractured his global communications and limited his access to money and weapons, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Monday.

Bin Laden has been backed into a corner, but it may take months to capture or kill the man the United States says was behind the Sept. 11 attacks, Wolfowitz told a Pentagon news conference.

"I think we've probably substantially reduced his authority over people who might be inclined to listen to him," and yet the al-Qaida terrorist network remains a threat to America and the world, he said.

Even though the Taliban has fallen and two or three of its senior officials were captured by rebel forces in recent days, most of the top leadership of the Taliban and al-Qaida remain at large, Wolfowitz said.

"It's going to be a very long and difficult job to find them, to root them out," he said.

With the search for bin Laden focused on Afghanistan's mountainous east, Wolfowitz said the sizable personal security forces that bin Laden keeps near him may make it easier to track him down. Without that security, however, bin Laden runs the risk of being turned in by Afghan bounty hunters, he said.

"This is a man on the run, a man with a big price on his head," Wolfowitz said.

The Pentagon disclosed that it targeted a cave in the Tora Bora area of northeastern Afghanistan with a rarely used 15,000-pound bomb, known as a "daisy cutter," on Sunday after receiving indications that the cave might have contained senior al-Qaida leaders, possibly including bin Laden.

Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, the deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the success of that U.S. attack was not yet clear because fierce fighting was still going on there.

At the very least, Stufflebeem said, the daisy cutter closed that cave's entrance and took a psychological toll on anyone nearby.

"This cave complex is literally on the sheer walls of a valley, and therefore the reverberation effect that goes up in those caves should have some kind of a negative effect," he said.

More Afghan rebel forces are asking the Pentagon for weapons and other supplies to help fight the al-Qaida, but Wolfowitz said these requests are being weighed carefully in light of the chaotic situation.

"We're getting some very recent defectors or people who have changed sides who now suddenly want weapons," he said. "We'd like to make sure that those weapons are going to be used to advance our objectives and not to get involved in some internal fight in Afghanistan."

U.S. Marines, meanwhile, expanded their hunt for Mullah Mohammed Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban regime that had harbored bin Laden since 1996. Marine ground and air assault teams moved closer to Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, where Omar is believed to be in hiding.

With the collapse of the Taliban regime now complete, the U.S. military is making preparations for what may be a lengthy hunt for bin Laden and Omar.

Officials said the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk, which has been afloat in the Arabian Sea with special operations helicopters aboard, will return to its home base in Japan. That would leave two carriers in the Arabian Sea to provide strike aircraft: the USS Carl Vinson and the USS Theodore Roosevelt. A third, the USS John Stennis, is en route.

Last week about 200 Army Rangers who had been based in Oman in the Persian Gulf returned to their home base in Georgia.

At his Pentagon news conference, Wolfowitz stressed repeatedly his view that, despite having eliminated the Taliban as a sponsor of global terrorism, the military campaign in Afghanistan is far from over. He said "running down people at sea" could become an additional element of the campaign, an apparent reference to tracking down ships that might try to smuggle al-Qaida leaders out of Pakistan.

"The war in Afghanistan is not won," he said. "The American people have to be prepared for the fact that we may be hunting Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan months from now."

AP-WS-12-10-01 1747EST