U.S. has bin Laden on the run

Herald news services

TALOQAN, Afghanistan — Taliban leaders, facing crushing bombings and further defections, appeared likely to lose one of their last remaining strongholds Sunday. New reports emerged, meanwhile, that Osama bin Laden was indeed on the run.

The Taliban in the contested northern city of Kunduz seemed on the verge of surrender late Sunday, as an ever-larger group of Taliban leaders contacted Northern Alliance intermediaries via radio with offers to give up the city.

Contradictory reports swirled as to whether thousands of high-ranking non-Afghan Taliban fighters holed up in Kunduz were blocking efforts to surrender — or had agreed to give up only if their safety were guaranteed.

To the south, however, the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar still appeared defiant, despite a heavy pounding by U.S. bombers that, according to the Afghan Islamic Press, left 46 dead. Sunday, Taliban officials said they still control the southern city, home to their supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar.

In a potential political breakthrough, Northern Alliance officials announced late Sunday that they would join other anti-Taliban forces to discuss Afghanistan’s future. The meetings could take place within a few days in Europe.

In Washington, Bush administration officials welcomed the announcement, made at a news conference in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, by the Northern Alliance foreign affairs chief, Abdullah Abdullah, and by the U.S. envoy, James Dobbins.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said he was "very pleased" that the alliance would attend the U.N.-convened meeting, considered an effort to avert further civil war.

But Powell added: "Let’s also keep in mind that our political objective was to get al-Qaida, that terrorist network, and Osama bin Laden."

For the first time, Taliban officials confirmed that Osama bin Laden was no longer in territory under their control. "I don’t know whether he is in Afghanistan or not," Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef said in Islamabad after returning from Kandahar.

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," said Powell, adding that bin Laden was believed to still be in Afghanistan. "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."

The U.S. has added more commandos to the chase and is aiming more airstrikes at hideouts near the border with Pakistan, officials said on Sunday.

Dozens of additional special operations troops have entered Afghanistan since Thursday, officials said, in the north as well as in a narrowing band of mountains along the southeast border with Pakistan, where intelligence reports suggest he is most likely to be.

Working in small teams, sometimes independently and sometimes in conjunction with Afghan rebels or British Special Air Service forces, American commandos have been bombarding suspected command posts, firing on enemy vehicles and sealing off roads near Kandahar by blowing up bridges. The allied forces are watching all movements closely from the air.

Administration officials nonetheless cautioned against complacency in the face of the Taliban’s abrupt reversals Sunday.

The announcement Sunday that the Northern Alliance will take part in U.N.-brokered talks about a new power-sharing government is a positive sign that, for now, the leaders of the many differing groups vying for power in Afghanistan are willing to negotiate.

Consensus on a broad-based government is viewed by the West as the only way to halt decades of bloodshed in the fractious country. The Northern Alliance itself is a loosely knit coalition of five groups, mostly representing ethnic minorities, driven from power by the Taliban and united largely by their hatred for them.

Already, fissures have emerged, as the Taliban’s power has waned. As Taliban forces have retreated, warlords have seized hold of their old fiefdoms, raising questions as to how they will be knit together into a new, broad-based government.

Kabul is shaping up as the center of one such power struggle. The troops that entered the capital were largely from one faction, Jamaat-i-Islami, to which the head of the Northern Alliance, Burhanuddin Rabbani, belongs.

But 3,000 Shiite Muslim fighters now poised outside of Kabul also want to be part of ruling the city if not the country. Shiite Muslims are a minority in Afghanistan.

Karim Khalili, the Shiite Muslim leader, told the Associated Press Sunday that he has appealed to the United Nations to quickly set up an interim government. "There is no one to protect our people," he said.

Questions of protection are also paramount in Kunduz, where the fate of 20,000 holed-up Taliban has been the focus of negotiations for the past six days.

Among the Taliban leaders trapped in Kunduz is Juma Namangani, whom U.S. officials believe to be a close associate of bin Laden’s.

General Mohammad Dawood, the Northern Alliance commander who now controls Taloqan, has said that his fighters have been trying to strike a deal with Taliban troops in Kunduz. His forces are ready to enter the city unless the Taliban make an agreement.

Dawood, the highest-ranking member of the Northern Alliance in this region, has said that he will guarantee clemency to Afghans who have found themselves swept up in the Taliban’s last stand.

But he has said that harsh judgment would fall upon 3,000 Pakistanis, Arabs, and Chechens who gathered in this province as they lost ground in neighboring areas.

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