US special forces are in southern Afghanistan as the military campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists moves into a much more difficult phase, top Pentagon officials said.
"We're not done yet," said General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
With the northern half of Afghanistan controlled by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, the focus of the fighting now shifts to the south, where US forces have had a much more difficult time drumming up opposition to the Taliban.
PHOTO: AP
The Taliban's spiritual center is the southern city of Kandahar, and its core support comes from the area's majority Pashtun ethnic group. Southern Afghanistan also has forbidding mountains, deep caves, underground bunkers and scores of other hiding places.
US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Tuesday raised the possibility that leaders of the Taliban or Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network might flee across the Afghan border into Iran to the west or Pakistan to the south and east.
He suggested 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."
A small number of US special forces troops are in southern Afghanistan "doing things that are helpful to our side and unhelpful to the other side," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news briefing. He said the US forces in the south were not working with anti-Taliban groups as the ones in the north have.
Rumsfeld was scheduled to travel to New York yesterday to visit the World Trade Center ruins as an illustration of why the US is fighting in Afghanistan.
Both Rumsfeld and Myers said increased strikes on Taliban forces, made more accurate with the help of US 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.
US President George W. Bush had urged the alliance not to enter Kabul out of fears that an alliance takeover would interfere with plans for a multi-ethnic coalition government to replace the Taliban. Alliance and US 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 US 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-Qaeda is brought to justice, we are not leaving."
Rumsfeld warned against concluding that the Taliban's retreat from the north meant the hunt for bin Laden and his terrorist network was almost over. He said US officials don't know where bin Laden is hiding.
With the capture of Kabul and other northern cities comes the potential for gaining information on the movements of bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, and the Taliban, US officials said.
US forces accompanying the 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.
A reporter asked Rumsfeld if he feared bin Laden would launch a new attack out of desperation.
"The idea that we could appease them by stopping doing what we're doing, or some implication that ... we're inciting them to attack us is just utter nonsense. It's kind of like feeding an alligator, hoping it eats you last," he said.
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