Wed, Jan 09, 2002 page1

• US shifts its focus as Blair visits Afghanistan

  THE NEXT PHASE British Minister Tony Blair and a group of US senators made brief, overlapping visits late Monday to the country, vowing to not abandon the region

  • AP AND REUTERS
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  The US military is winding down its search for terror mastermind Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora after failing to find him in the bomb-shattered cave complex and is targeting air and ground attacks against remnants of the al-Qaeda network and the Taliban to stop them from regrouping.

  The shift in military activity comes as the US-led coalition focuses increasingly on rebuilding the war-ravaged nation. British Minister Tony Blair and a group of US senators made brief, overlapping visits late Monday to Afghanistan and vowed to help the country create a more stable environment that would prevent extremists from again coming to power.

  

  British Prime Minister Tony Blair looks at Afghanistan's Interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai at Bagram air base.

  PHOTO: REUTERS

  In Kandahar, a high-ranking security official for Governor Gul Agha, Commander Sadozai, said yesterday that top Taliban officials sent a messenger three or four days ago saying they wanted to talk about surrendering. The officials did not disclose the names of the Taliban members or their location, but former Taliban defense minister Mullah Ubai Dullah is said to be among them.

  Agha and others were in a tribal council meeting late yesterday evening to try to decide how to handle the surrender offer, said Sadozai, who uses one name only.

  Blair and the US senators made the visits under extremely tight security to Bagram Air Base near Kabul. They met soldiers from their countries and the leader of Afghanistan's new interim administration, Prime Minister Hamid Karzai.

  Both Blair and the senators said the Sept. 11 attacks were partly the result of the international community turning its back on Afghanistan after the Soviet occupation ended in the 1980s, allowing the country to become what the British leader called a "terrorist breeding ground."

  Speaking at the Bagram base, Blair said:"Afghanistan has been a failed state for too long and the whole world has paid the price -- in the export of terror, the export of drugs and finally in the explosion in death and destruction on the streets of the US."

  Blair was the first Western head of government to visit Kabul since the attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11. He said "extraordinary progress" had been achieved by the US-led war against the Taliban regime that harbored Osama bin Laden, suspected of ordering the attacks.

  "We are always on the side of the Afghan people against the Taliban," he said. "And we remain on the side of the Afghan people today."

  Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman Omar Samad quoted Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, as expressing regret "for the lack of US involvement prior to Sept. 11."

  Meanwhile, demonstrating the country's deep suffering, a team of journalists discovered a village in remote northern Afghanistan where people are slowly starving to death, struggling to stay alive on bread made from grass. Mothers whose milk has dried up feed their babies grass porridge.

  Elsewhere, near the western city of Herat, the number of refugees at the Maklash camp has tripled to at least 300,000 in the past 30 days, aid workers said. Toilets, clean water, food and shelter are scarce.

  About 1,000 more people arrive every day, mostly from northwestern Badghis and Ghor provinces. The newcomers say that back home, it is snowing, food has run out and people are dying of cold.

  In the southern city of Kandahar, one of the seven heavily armed al-Qaeda fighters who had been holed up for more than a month in a hospital, threatening to kill anyone who tried to move them, made a pre-dawn escape attempt yesterday. He exploded a grenade and killed himself when soldiers surrounded him. His name and nationality were unknown.

  General Tommy Franks, commander of the US war effort, said at his headquarters in Florida that the weeks-long search through the tunnels and rubble of the Tora Bora complex in eastern Afghanistan had failed to turn up bin Laden.
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