The United States on Tuesday warned any country considering giving refuge to Osama bin Laden to think again as US special forces hunted the remnants of his al Qaeda organization in the barren Afghan mountains.
US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the war that has ravaged Afghanistan should be lesson enough to any country that might be contemplate harboring the man accused of planning the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
``I just think any country in the world that would knowingly harbor bin Laden would be out of their minds,'' Wolfowitz told a Pentagon news briefing.
``I think they've seen what happened to the Taliban, and I think that's probably a pretty good lesson for people.''
Wolfowitz's comments followed days of rousing success for US forces in their fight against al Qaeda and its Taliban protectors. But the campaign has failed to track down the Saudi-born millionaire accused of masterminding the carnage at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Afghan fighters marched down from the peaks around the village of Tora Bora on Tuesday, signaling the destruction of al Qaeda forces in the area believed to be bin Laden's last redoubt in Afghanistan.
WHEREABOUTS STILL A MYSTERY
Villagers looking for firewood or hoping to salvage their homes climbed into the rugged hills, which are honeycombed with caves and tunnels where bin Laden and his fighters were suspected of hiding out. US special forces returned from the hills empty-handed in their hunt for bin Laden.
American warplanes which bombed bin Laden's guerrillas out of their mountain hide-outs last week flew more sorties on Tuesday in their hunt for bin Laden.
With the Taliban vanquished and the US government focusing more on catching its public enemy number one, officials frankly admitted they did not know where bin Laden was or even if he was still alive.
``We don't know where he is now, and he could be on the run,'' Wolfowitz said. Asked whether bin Laden might be hiding in one of the caves at Tora Bora, Wolfowitz replied, ``It's possible he could be dead at the bottom of one of them.''
The US envoy to Pakistan, James Dobbins, said it was impossible to seal the long and remote border between Afghanistan and Pakistan but that this would not necessarily be an obstacle to eventually catching the Saudi-born militant.
``I don't think it's possible to prevent individuals from crossing the border,'' Dobbins told a news conference in Islamabad. Still, he said, ``I think it is possible, once they have done so, to apprehend them over time and to ensure they are dealt with appropriately.''
YEMEN RAIDS HIDE-OUT
Yemen gave a taste of the pressure bin Laden might find if he ventures outside his Afghan bastion as Yemeni forces stormed a hide-out of Islamic militants linked to the Saudi exile, in the first action of its kind in the Arabian peninsula nation since the September attacks on the United States.
Twelve people from both sides were killed and at least 22 wounded when Yemeni special forces used helicopters and tanks against the al-Jalal tribe, who were thought to be sheltering the militants 85 miles east of the capital, Sanaa, tribal and security sources told Reuters.
A wide range of US aircraft ranging from giant B-1 bombers to nimble F-14 jets was in flight over Afghanistan on Tuesday, but by noon Washington time, no bombs had been dropped, said Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the US military's Joint Chiefs of Staff.
``What they do now, as they have done for the last several weeks, is to fly into Afghan airspace, go to a designated orbit point and be available to respond to calls from the people we have on the ground,'' Pace told reporters.
The demise of the fundamentalist Taliban opened the way for a new flurry of diplomatic activity over the future of the country, which has seen almost nonstop civil war since the late 1970s.
KARZAI IN ROME
In Rome, the man who will take charge of a transitional government in Afghanistan on Saturday said the new Afghan government would take the fight against terrorism to ``its absolute end'' and that Afghans were among those who had most suffered from terrorism.
``We are very, very much determined to end this course, both in Afghanistan and in the rest of the world, to finish (off) their bases, to finish (off) their elements,'' Hamid Karzai, designated prime minister of a post-Taliban interim government, told a news conference with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Earlier, he warned rival armed groups that they will have to join forces and be prepared to serve under a single ministry of defense -- a tough proposition for groups more accustomed to settling differences with guns.
``They are part of Afghanistan. We have a ministry of defense and all forces in Afghanistan must eventually be under the ministry of defense,'' Karzai told reporters.
Many of the groups forming the opposition Northern Alliance which ousted the hard-line Taliban from power with the help of US bombing were once bitter foes. Memories are still fresh from the early 1990s, when street battles between ethnic militias reduced much of Kabul to rubble.
Karzai met in Rome with the 87-year-old exiled former Afghan king Mohammad Zahir Shah, due to return home next year to open a Loya Jirga, or grand council, to map out the country's future as part of a UN-sponsored peace plan.
In a symbolic gesture of solidarity at their meeting, the king gave Karzai his personal copy of the Koran.
In Kabul, the country's new rulers and the US-led coalition inched toward agreement on the deployment of foreign peace forces in the capital. Coalition leaders Britain and the United States wanted to see the international force in place in time for the new government's taking office.
The main sticking point was the size of the peace force, with Northern Alliance leaders eager to keep the number of foreign troops to a minimum.
RUMSFELD WARNS EUROPEAN ALLIES
In Brussels, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued a somber warning to Europeans that horrors like those of Sept. 11 could be visited on their own capitals in ``the tumultuous decades ahead.'' He urged security cooperation among the allies to prevent future such attacks.
``The terrorists and their state sponsors have demonstrated both their ingenuity and their ruthless disregard for human life,'' Rumsfeld said at his first NATO meeting since the attacks, in which nearly 3,300 people died.
``As we look at the devastation they unleashed in the United States, contemplate the destruction they could wreak in New York, or London, or Paris, or Berlin with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.''
Fears that al Qaeda or Taliban fighters could still pose a threat resurfaced when a US Marines spokesman in Afghanistan said ground-to-air missiles had been fired at two US transport planes near the city of Kandahar on Tuesday.
But a spokesman at US Central Command in Florida said later there had been no attack, although the C-130 planes had taken evasive action after seeing flashes on the ground.
Instead of hostile fire, he said, the flashes were now thought to have been part of celebrations of the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.
(China Daily December 19, 2001)
