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Rumsfeld: Terror leaders not found
By MATT KELLEY
Associated Press Writer
11/14/01
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday it is gratifying to see the people of Afghanistan getting their country back but acknowledged that key Taliban leaders have yet to be found.
"Some have been killed, others are hiding, and there are no particular reports of senior leadership having been located,'' Rumsfeld said in New York, where he toured the World Trade Center ruins. The visit was intended to illustrate why the United States is fighting in Afghanistan.
He said U.S. special forces are watching key roads in southern Afghanistan as Taliban militia forces flee southward.
"They have been interdicting the main roads that connect the north to the south to see what's going on and to stop people that they think ought to be stopped,'' Rumsfeld said during a brief news conference with New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
"We still have a ways to go'' in the hunt for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, Rumsfeld said. "The Taliban, some pieces of it, are melting into the countryside because they have decided to toss in the towel. In other cases, they may be simply waiting to counterattack at some other time.''
With the northern half of Afghanistan controlled by the anti-Taliban northern alliance, the focus of the fighting now shifts to the south, where U.S. forces have had a much more difficult time drumming up opposition to the Taliban.
The Taliban's spiritual center is the southern city of Kandahar, and its core support comes from the area's majority Pashtun ethnic group. Pentagon spokesman Dick McGraw dismissed reports Wednesday that Kandahar had fallen to rebel troops, saying, "It is far from being a stable situation anywhere yet.''
Southern Afghanistan also has forbidding mountains, deep caves, underground bunkers and scores of other hiding places. Intensified U.S. efforts to search for al-Qaida leadership has centered on such caves, "trying to crush them'' with bombs, McGraw told reporters at the Pentagon.
Rumsfeld on Tuesday raised the possibility that leaders of the Taliban or al-Qaida terrorist network might flee across the Afghan border into Iran to the west or Pakistan to the south and east.
He cited three possibilities, any of which he said would lead to the eventual demise of both groups:
"They can flee and reorganize in the south, they can flee and melt into the countryside, or they can defect. If they reorganize in the south, we're going to go get them. If they go to ground, we will, as the president said, root them out. And if they decide to flee, I doubt that they'll find peace wherever they select.''
Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news briefing that the small number of U.S. special forces in south are not working with anti-Taliban groups as the ones in the north have.
Both Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said increased airstrikes on Taliban forces, made more accurate with the help of U.S. forces with the northern alliance, were one key to the alliance's quick takeover of a large swath of Afghanistan. The opposition forces poured into Kabul on Tuesday after Taliban forces beat a hasty retreat.
President Bush had urged the alliance not to enter Kabul out of fears that an alliance takeover would interfere with plans for a multiethnic coalition government to replace the Taliban. Alliance and U.S. military officials said a small number of opposition troops entered Kabul to keep the city from descending into chaos.
Bush, in private talks Tuesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, was emphatic about fulfilling American goals in Afghanistan, according to senior administration officials speaking on condition of anonymity. The officials said Bush at one point pointed his finger, thumped his hand on the table for emphasis and said: "Until the al-Qaida is brought to justice, we are not leaving.''
With the capture of Kabul and other northern cities comes the potential for gaining information on the movements of bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders, and the Taliban, U.S. officials said.
U.S. forces accompanying northern alliance commanders are searching for Taliban items like computer disks, maps and documents that might contain useful intelligence, one official said. They probably also are interviewing Taliban prisoners and commanders who defected to the alliance.
U.S. bombs fell in Afghanistan for a 38th day, and Rumsfeld said that in the aftermath of the Taliban's collapse in the north, the United States had two short-term goals besides hunting down the terrorists. They were opening a "land bridge'' to Uzbekistan in the north and repairing airports near Mazar-e-Sharif and north of Kabul, so that more humanitarian aid could be brought in.
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On the Net:
Library of Congress on Afghanistan: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/aftoc.html