Military finds bin Laden’s shadow

Associated Press

The weeks-long search of caves in Afghanistan’s mountainous Tora Bora region failed to find terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden but yielded evidence that he was once holed up there with Taliban supporters, Gen. Tommy Franks, the U.S. war commander, said Monday.

And U.S. forces in Afghanistan are focusing more on finding and attacking all remaining Taliban and al-Qaida members and less on the hunt for bin Laden, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem said Monday.

"We’re going to stop chasing the shadows of where we thought he (bin Laden) was and focus more on the entire picture of the country," Stufflebeem said.

Franks said the search at Tora Bora was ending with no clue to bin Laden’s whereabouts.

"We’ll have that pretty well cleared and be out of there in the next day or so," Franks said from Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla.

Some U.S. special forces soldiers will remain in the Tora Bora area to "sweep" villages for potential intelligence and to act as liaisons with local tribal elders, he said.

Franks said that if the United States acquired information that bin Laden or other top suspects had fled into Pakistan he could either ask the Pakistanis to pursue them or U.S. forces could do it themselves.

"We could contact them and say, all right, we are observing people and we are going to follow them into Pakistan," he said, adding that the U.S. military has had a one-star general in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, since early October to develop that kind of cooperation.

Franks said U.S. special forces soldiers are on the Pakistani side of the border to coordinate on such a pursuit.

He also said that in the next day or two the U.S. military would gain custody of one or two Taliban or al-Qaida figures of great interest to the United States. He would not elaborate.

American warplanes continue to strike a "hotbed" of terrorist support in eastern Afghanistan to wipe out regrouping Taliban and al-Qaida forces and hidden weaponry, Stufflebeem said.

A major weapons cache that included tanks also was bombed there, Stufflebeem said.

Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said American aircraft flew 118 sorties and conducted four airstrikes Sunday, one on the base at Zawar and three others in the Khost area.

Khost is known as the headquarters of Jalaluddin Haqqani, a former minister in the ousted Taliban regime who is high on the U.S. most-wanted list.

The strikes were conducted by long-range B-52 and B-1 bombers, as well as carrier-based strike planes from warships in the Indian Ocean.

At Zawar Kili, U.S. soldiers who have been searching the complex piled up ammunition near tanks and other heavy weapons and called in the airstrike, defense officials said. The soldiers also found a large number of bodies of suspected al-Qaida members killed in earlier airstrikes, officials said.