Afghanistan's interim leader, Hamid Karzai, headed home yesterday, vowing to end "warlordism" and rebuild his country as the US forces who helped bring him to power puzzled over the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.
With Karzai due to take office on Saturday, diplomats and military sources said the first units of an international force would be in place in the capital Kabul by the time he took over, but that they would have a low-key role.
Pakistan, once close to bin Laden's Taliban protectors but now an ally in the US war on global terrorism, said its troops had captured dozens of his al-Qaeda fighters fleeing across the border.
Across the border at the airport outside the Taliban's former southern stronghold of Kandahar, the FBI interrogated other captured fighters loyal to bin Laden, the man Washington blames for the Sept. 11 suicide attacks on the US.
Karzai told reporters before leaving Rome, where he received the blessing of Afghanistan's exiled king, that he wanted to root out terrorism and the rule of the gun in a country that has known two decades of war.
"Warlordism must end and the rule of the gun must end in Afghanistan," he said, before flying to Kabul.
Diplomatic and military sources in the Afghan capital said a vanguard of about 100 British Royal Marines from the vessel HMS Fearless were expected to arrive in the city in time for Saturday's installation of Karzai's post-Taliban interim government.
Many details of the deployment, including the precise role and size of the force, still had to be worked out in talks with defense-minister designate Mohammad Fahim, military chief of the Northern Alliance that took Kabul from the Taliban last month.
One source said he expected the force, which several countries have offered to join, to number between 2,000 and 4,000 soldiers when fully deployed.
Karzai said he would accept any number necessary to be beneficial.
In a late-night interview in Rome, Karzai pledged to fight terrorism to "its absolute end."
There was "total agreement by all concerned that Afghanistan must have a national army that should be totally under the control of the Ministry of Defense and a national police force under total control of the Ministry of the Interior," he said.
In a reminder of the problems facing the new administration, French journalists leaving Kandahar for Pakistan said guards near Takhteh Pol told them Taliban militia had attacked that town overnight and it was unclear who was in control.
Although the Taliban have been ousted from all but a few pockets of resistance in Afghanistan, the primary targets of the US-led campaign -- bin Laden and his chief protector, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar -- were still at large.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told reporters in Washington that the US did not know whether bin Laden was on the run inside of Afghanistan, had fled across the border, or was dead at the bottom of one of his cave hideouts.
But he had a blunt warning for any nation giving him refuge.
"I just think any country in the world that would knowingly harbor bin Laden would be out of their minds, and I think they've seen what happened to the Taliban and I think that's probably a pretty good lesson for people not to do that."
Yemen gave a hint of the reception bin Laden may face outside Afghanistan after storming a hide-out of Islamic militants linked to him, the first action of its kind in the Arabian peninsula nation since the Sept. 11 attacks.
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