Terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network are on the run in Afghanistan and their Taliban supporters are in disarray, but the American-led military campaign to crush them is far from over, US administration officials said on Sunday.
Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in separate talk show interviews, both said they have no reason to believe bin Laden has escaped Afghanistan.
"I have seen no intelligence or information to suggest" he has left, Powell said on ABC's "This Week."
The Taliban's envoy to Pakistan said Saturday that bin Laden had left Afghanistan, but that has not been substantiated. Later, the diplomat said he meant only that bin Laden was outside areas under Taliban control.
Powell, Wolfowitz and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice all suggested bin Laden's room to maneuver is shrinking, his options narrowing.
"It's getting harder for him to hide as more and more territory is removed from Taliban control," Powell said. "I don't think there's any country in the region that would be anxious to give him guest privileges if he showed up."
Wolfowitz described bin Laden as "in very great danger" of being killed or captured.
"This is a man on the run who's doing his best to hide," Wolfowitz said on CBS's "Face the Nation."
Added Rice: "We're beginning to narrow his possibilities for hiding."
US bombing continued Sunday in the Kandahar area in southern Afghanistan and the Kunduz area in the north. The Pentagon also reported that 75 strike aircraft participated in Saturday's attacks in six target areas near Kabul, the capital. In keeping with its usual practice of reporting details only from the previous day's attacks, the Pentagon said tunnels and caves used by Taliban and al-Qaida leaders were among the targets.
Powell said the Central Intelligence Agency has been doing "some rather splendid work with respect to our activities in Afghanistan, working alongside our military forces that are inside in Afghanistan."
The Washington Post reported Sunday the CIA has paramilitary forces in Afghanistan; Powell would not confirm that.
"I think we've got a very fine linkup between our intelligence assets, our military assets, all within the framework of a good political and military strategy," Powell said on ABC's "This Week." "And it's now starting to show rather significant results."
If bin Laden were to flee Afghanistan, the United States would keep up the hunt, Wolfowitz said.
"We are going to continue pursuing him," he said. "Let's also remember, we're going to continue pursuing the entire al-Qaida network, which is in 60 countries, not just Afghanistan and, worst of all, here in the United States. ... This is a campaign against all the global terrorist networks and the states that support terrorism."
Powell said no country on the periphery of Afghanistan - even China - would give bin Laden a haven.
"I don't think this fellow is going to be welcome anywhere," he said. "He is an outcast. He is a murderer, he's a terrorist. ... He is on the run, just as the president said he would be. And we will get him."
Rice cautioned against assuming that the military successes in Afghanistan over the past week mean the United States has met its main objective.
"This may take a while," she said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
She also left open the possibility that Iraq could become a target in Bush's war on terrorism.
"We do not need the events of September 11 to tell us that this is a very dangerous man who is a threat to his own people, a threat to the region, and a threat to us because he is determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction," she said.
Powell spoke encouragingly of the prospects for convening a meeting, under UN sponsorship, between the northern alliance of opposition groups and other factions to form a new power-sharing government in Afghanistan.
"The purpose of the meeting would be to bring together a number of leaders representing different parts of Afghanistan, different ethnicities, different tribes, and see if we can get an interim government in place and then stand up a broader government over time," Powell said.
Sen. Trent Lott, the Senate Republican leader, said on "Fox News Sunday" that the United States should not focus too hard on the political issues so long as the military campaign was not finished.
"I don't think we ought to be obsessed with, you know, the next government," Lott said. "We ought to be obsessed with getting the people that have been killing people all over the world ... I think the American people want us to go forth and do the deed."
(China Daily November 19, 2001)
