Killing or capturing Osama bin Laden is the key to defeating the al-Qaeda terror network, the NATO commander in Afghanistan told US legislators in testimony on Capitol Hill.
General Stanley McChrystal said the additional 30,000 troops ordered by US President Barack Obama would turn back insurgent momentum in Afghanistan “by this time next year” and cut off the Taliban from the population.
Testifying on Tuesday about the US military surge of forces in Afghanistan, he said of bin Laden: “I believe he is an iconic figure at this point whose survival emboldens al-Qaeda as a franchising organization across the world.”
“It would not defeat al-Qaeda to have him captured or killed, but I don’t think that we can finally defeat al-Qaeda until he’s captured or killed,” McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
US officials believe that bin Laden — considered the chief mastermind of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people — is hiding along the mountainous Afghan-Pakistani border.
US Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, also speaking at the hearing, said that capturing or killing bin Laden “does remain important to the American people — indeed, the people of the world.”
McChrystal and Eikenberry testified one week after Obama ordered an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.
US national security adviser James Jones told CNN on Sunday that the latest intelligence reports suggest that bin Laden “is somewhere inside north Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border, hiding in very, very rough mountainous area, generally ungoverned.”
However, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, also speaking Sunday, said in an interview that Washington did not know where bin Laden was and had lacked reliable information on his whereabouts for years.
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