US moves to seal Taliban escape routes
The United States and its allies were today moving to seal off potential escape routes - even at sea - for terror chief Osama bin Laden.
‘‘They keep tracking and dodging and bobbing and weaving, and we’re looking,’’ US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said when asked how close the military was to finding bin Laden and his terrorist cohorts.
Taliban spokesman Syed Tayyab Agha said the Taliban had ‘‘no idea’’ where bin Laden, blamed for the September 11 terror attacks in the United States, was located. ‘‘There is no relation right now. There is no communication,’’ he told journalists in the southern Afghanistan border town of Spinboldak, in Taliban-controlled territory.
Agha vowed that the Taliban would fight to keep the one-quarter of Afghanistan they still hold, particularly the southern city of Kandahar. But Taliban commanders in Kunduz - the last city held by the militia in the north - held negotiations yesterday with the Northern Alliance for the city’s surrender.
It was reported that a Taliban deputy defence minister, Muhammed Fazil Mazlon, agreed that forces under his command at Kunduz - both Afghan Taliban and foreign fighters loyal to bin Laden - would surrender. Details of a deal were not yet worked out.
Meanwhile, the US-led coalition moved to cut off a potential escape route for bin Laden if he managed to slip out of landlocked Afghanistan into neighbouring Pakistan.
The US Navy gave notice on Tuesday that it would stop and board merchant shipping off the Pakistani coast if the ships were suspected of carrying him or other al-Qaida leaders, Defence Department spokesman Lt Col Dave Lapan said yesterday in Washington.
General Peter Pace, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the Navy, so far has not stopped and boarded any ships off Pakistan. He said there was no specific information indicating that terrorist leaders would try to flee by sea.
The Navy has a large fleet in the northern Arabian Sea, but the long, sparsely-populated Pakistani coast is ideal for smugglers, with many places where small boats can pick up passengers.
The only major port is Karachi, also home to several hardline Islamic parties that support the Taliban and bin Laden, and the towns of Omara and Pasni have harbours that could take small boats - but otherwise there are few natural harbours.
US forces have destroyed two or three enemy aircraft in recent weeks, but officials do not know if they were carrying Taliban or al-Qaida leaders trying to flee Afghanistan, Pace said at the US Defence Department.
As many as 1,500 Marines specially trained for complex missions such as counter-terrorism probably will be sent to Afghanistan soon, perhaps this week, a senior US official said, though no final decision has been made on their use.
The Marines could provide security for other US forces or help Army and Air Force special operations troops expand the search for bin Laden.
President George Bush launched the campaign against the Taliban in early October for its refusal to hand over bin Laden. After weeks of US bombing against Taliban positions, a Northern Alliance advance swept the Islamic militia out of almost all the north and took Kabul on November 13.
The US-backed Northern Alliance has agreed to attend power-sharing talks for a post-Taliban government in Germany, next week, and the search is on for leaders to represent the dominant Pashtun ethnic group.
Yesterday Bush told cheering US troops at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, that the United States had ‘‘made a good start in Afghanistan, yet there is still a lot to be done’’.
‘‘There are still terrorists on the loose in Afghanistan, yet we will find and destroy their network piece by piece,’’ he said.
General Tommy Franks, commanding the US-led campaign in Afghanistan, said the allies would keep up relentless pressure to bring about the fall of the Taliban’s last strongholds.
‘‘We need to complete the work in Kandahar ... and most importantly we need to complete the destruction of the al-Qaida terrorist network,’’ he said.
There was little activity on the Kunduz battle front yesterday, either in the skies or on the ground.
The alliance’s main commander in the north, Atta Mohammed, said terms of any surrender deal with Afghan Taliban fighters in Kunduz would not necessarily apply to several thousand Arab, Pakistani and Chechen fighters loyal to bin Laden.
Rumsfeld has said the al-Qaida fighters should not be allowed to escape Kunduz and should either be killed or taken prisoner.
Refugees fleeing Kunduz have said the foreign fighters were preventing a Taliban surrender and shooting would-be defectors.
Over the past week, ethnic Pashtun tribal leaders from across the border in Pakistan have been trying to persuade the Taliban to surrender Kandahar in the south. Coalition spokesman Kenton Keith said Taliban control over Kandahar was ‘‘loosening’’.
Agha, the Taliban spokesman, insisted the militia would hold out in the city where their movement was born. ‘‘We will not give any chance to anybody to disturb our Islamic rule in Kandahar and other provinces,’’ Agha said, adding that the militia’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was safe in a secret location.
He said America and its allies ‘‘should forget the 11 September attacks’’ because Afghans had nothing to do with them.
‘‘The attacks have taken place in America and the people who performed and did the attacks, they were in America, so this is not something connecting with Afghanistan,’’ he said. ‘‘This is not our problem.’’
That drew a sharp response from US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. ‘‘I can assure them we will not forget about September 11,’’ Wolfowitz said in Washington. ‘‘We are moving on, and I think before long the world will forget about the Taliban.’’
