An anti-Taliban revolt said to be gathering pace in the militia's strongholds in southern Afghanistan yesterday has boosted the prospects of the US hunting down its most wanted man -- Osama bin Laden.
"The chances of him being betrayed, sold out or whatever are extremely high," Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid said from the Pakistani city of Lahore.
The US-led alliance searching for bin Laden, prime suspect for the Sept. 11 attacks on the US, has put a US$5 million price on the head of the Saudi-born militant.
"There is tremendous ferment across the south now," said Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who has covered Afghanistan for 20 years and whose book on the Taliban has become a bestseller.
"People are turning against the Taliban and there have been defectors from the Taliban who can be interviewed for a mine of information and intelligence on where bin Laden is."
US President George W. Bush told a news conference the net was closing on bin Laden and his allies.
"We're making great progress in our objective, and that is to tighten the net and eventually bring al-Qaeda to justice and, at the same time, deal with the government that's been harboring them," Bush said.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said bin Laden and top lieutenants were believed to be "in the key Taliban area around Kandahar," home of Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
"They are more confined than they were, and we remain absolutely determined to break up the al-Qaeda network and -- to pick up President Bush's phrase -- either bring bin Laden to justice, or justice to bin Laden," he said in New York.
Although the Taliban's strongest backing comes from Pashtuns, many Pashtun groups are against them and the support of others is tenuous and likely to evaporate if the militia seems to be crumbling.
Rashid said that an uprising in the south would cause huge problems for bin Laden's foreign fighters.
"The Arabs cannot survive without local support," he said. "The logistics, food, water, the terrain, the languages -- they need local support. If that is being eroded then they can't survive."
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