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Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rich4eagle who wrote (1537)	12/17/2001 2:58:25 AM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Bin Laden trail goes cold : Al-Qaida routed, but battle fails to unearth terror leader John Hooper in Tora Bora and David Teather in New York Monday December 17, 2001 The Guardian America's campaign to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and exterminate his organisation was in disarray last night after Afghan warlords battling al-Qaida in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan announced that they were calling off the hunt, while Washington admitted the Saudi-born terrorist could have escaped to Pakistan. Senior Afghan fighters leading the campaign to force al-Qaida guerrillas out of their caves to an icy death in the snow-filled White Mountains claimed yesterday that the task had been completed. "This is the last day of al-Qaida in Afghanistan," declared Mohammed Zeman, one of the three commanders in Tora Bora. "We did the job that it was our duty to do: we cleared the land of al-Qaida." His fellow commander, Hasrat Ali, claimed: "There is no cave that is not under the control of our mojahedin." He described how a last, six-man pocket of resistance had been flushed out, with five of Bin Laden's diehards perishing and a sixth being captured. The detainee was among 25 guerrillas, the warlord said, who were in their hands. They put al-Qaida's overall death toll in yesterday's fighting at around 200. The note of euphoria sounded by the Afghan commanders was singularly lacking in Washington, however, where the apparent military victory over al-Qaida instantly prompted doubts about the ability of the US to capture its public enemy number one. Asked yesterday whether Bin Laden could have fled to Pakistan, Condoleezza Rice, the US national security adviser, replied: "Anything is possible." Pentagon officials also made an embarrassing retreat from earlier claims that the US had pinpointed Bin Laden to the Tora Bora mountains by intercepting his radio calls. Yesterday US officials said they were trying to establish whether the calls could have been made from outside Afghanistan. Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary who spent the day with US troops at the Bagram airbase outside Kabul, said up to 2,000 al-Qaida fighters were on the run, "trying to get away into the hills and other places". Both Afghan fighters and US special forces were in pursuit, he said. The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, added to the sense of confusion surrounding the main war aim of the US campaign against terrorism, saying simply: "We don't know where [Bin Laden] is. We have no reason to believe he has been either killed or captured." Mr Powell added: "Our best guess is that Osama bin Laden is still in Afghanistan but I can't ignore the possibility that he might have gotten out." The apparent rout of al-Qaida, and the elusiveness of its leader, presents US president George Bush with a difficult choice between deploying US forces on the ground in numbers hitherto unseen - with the consequent risks of body bags - and accepting that for the moment Bin Laden has eluded their grasp. Though the occasional US plane was still last night rumbling through the skies of eastern Afghanistan, no bombs had been dropped on the White Mountains since just after midday local time. In the two weeks since US forces and local fighters began their attack on al-Qaida's bases, the three warlords spearheading the push against al-Qaida in Tora Bora have repeatedly mooted the idea of an orderly surrender - only to see the notion firmly rejected by Bin Laden's troops. Yesterday's unilateral declaration of victory, made, perhaps significantly, on the festival of Eid a-Fitr, offered an alternative way out. Hasrat Ali said the rump of the al-Qaida forces had nowhere to flee except further up the mountains, where they would find themselves surrounded by snow. "Maybe 500 have escaped, but they have nothing to eat, so how can they survive?" Yesterday, a Pakistani news agency reported that the government in Islamabad had sent 4,000 commandos to the border in an effort to block any movement by the al-Qaida troops into the country. Mohammed Zeman said mopping up operations on the Afghan side of the frontier would require a "metre by metre" search of the area previously held by al-Qaida. But he had no solution to the mystery of Bin Laden's whereabouts. The third of the three warlords leading the campaign in Tora Bora, Abdul Zahir, appeared to be less confident than his colleagues that the war against Bin Laden's last stronghold was won. "We keep on fighting. From now on, there will be no negotiations until it is finished," he said. But Commander Zeman insisted the ground forces attacking al-Qaida had located the terrorist overlord's cave. When asked what it looked like, he replied: "It looked like a cave." Pressed to speculate where Bin Laden has gone, he said: "God knows. I don't know." guardian.co.uk