The Boston Globe December 11, 2001
BUSH BLASTS BIN LADEN TAPE 'WORST OF CIVILIZATION'
By John Donnelly, and Michael Kranish, Globe Staff
TORA BORA, Afghanistan - Osama bin Laden's fighters have been chased to a mountaintop in this remote area by Afghan forces who seized wide swaths of Al Qaeda's last stronghold, a senior Afghan military commander said last night.
In Washington, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, described bin Laden as being "on the run" and said more US troops may join the small contingent of special forces already in the area.
"We will do what we need to do," Wolfowitz said about US troops, but he added, "The more we can get local allies to do that job for us, the better."
Those local allies, a group of tribes loosely known as the Eastern Alliance, yesterday launched a three-pronged guerrilla offensive in an effort to root out Al Qaeda. Hazarat Ali, one of the two top Afghan military commanders here, said his forces have captured numerous caves with almost no resistance from Al Qaeda soldiers. "We control all of the Milawa and Tora Bora areas except one place, and we control all the Al Qaeda places with the heavy weapons," Ali told reporters. "All they have left is the top of a mountain." It was not possible late last night to independently confirm Ali's claims, which even if true, do not rule out a protracted battle with the Qaeda fighters.
Significantly, a convoy of up to nine vehicles carrying US special forces was spotted on a road near the front line, after journalists heard several helicopters for the first time in the region since the war in Afghanistan started. A Pentagon official last night confirmed that "dozens" of special forces were in the area.
More US troops could quickly be brought in on helicopters, a Pentagon official said, with the nearby, newly rebuilt Jalalabad airport serving as a likely staging area.
The apparent gains by the Afghan fighters followed pressure from American advisers to step up the fight against Al Qaeda soldiers. But the six-day offensive up to now had been severely hampered by poor logistical planning.
The mountaintop area to which Al Qaeda forces apparently have fled is called Regan, encompassing about 10 square miles.
Asked about bin Laden's whereabouts, Ali said he was "90 percent certain" that bin Laden was in the Regan area. Ali, who is also the security commander of three eastern Afghanistan provinces, said Afghan troops had captured the strategic territory in only a few hours. He said his troops had found four bodies.
He said that the Al Qaeda fighters "maybe have already gone away . . . maybe to Pakistan."
In Washington, Pentagon officials also said they also believed bin Laden was in the Tora Bora area, but Wolfowitz acknowledged that US intelligence has not come up with a solid report about bin Laden.
"The reports that we get tend to leave him in that area," Wolfowitz said, while adding, "The kinds of reports that we're working on are very fragmentary - not very reliable."
Still, Wolfowitz said, "This is a man on the run, a man with a big price on his head, a man who has to wake up every day and decide, 'Do I keep all the security around me, which I need to make sure that some Afghan bounty hunters don't turn me in, but which help to give a lot of reports about my whereabouts, or do I go into hiding?' He doesn't have a lot of good options."
As for fears that bin Laden may escape across the border, Wolfowitz said at a briefing that the United States was working closely with Pakistan to tighten security. He added that US ships are continuing to watch Pakistan's coast in the event bin Laden has already crossed the border and tries to escape by sea. Separately, a Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity said there was no way for US and Pakistani troops to secure the entire border. "We are still hopeful and confident we will be able to track him down, but we don't harbor any illusions that it is 100 percent," the official said.
US forces are using a variety of technologies that could be used to track bin Laden if he is exposed on the ridgelines. The technologies include spy satellites that can track details as small as license plates, unmanned drones equipped with long-distance cameras, and other spy planes equipped with night-vision and thermal imaging.
Defense analyst John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, said bin Laden would be especially hard to track if he is traveling on foot, with few people, and if he avoids being near any heat-generating equipment that could be picked up by thermal imaging devices.
Some former US officials believe that the only way to finish the job would be to send more US troops.
"Up to now, it's been relatively easy in Afghanistan because you've had lousy fighters against lousy fighters," said Jay Farrar, a former senior defense official. "Now what you got are folks with their backs against the wall who will fight fiercely. It's going to take a lot more US military involvement to defeat them."
But sending more US forces entails great risk. Afghan commanders here believe that Al Qaeda has far more firepower than it has shown in the last week. One concern is that bin Laden and his senior lieutenants possess weapons of mass destruction in their fortified and deep caves.
Prior to yesterday's offensive, Al Qaeda fighters have fired mortars at Afghan positions, forcing them to abandon several spots on high ground.
But for the first time in three days, Soviet-made T-55 tanks fired shells at Al Qaeda positions.
Commander Haji Zahir, who is the son of Jalalabad's governor, Hadi Qadir, said that he didn't want to give details of the offensive because Al Qaeda forces "are watching and listening to" the media.
He and Afghan Commander Haftagul predicted the Afghan soldiers would control the Tora Bora area by the end of Ramadan, in five days. Responding to a critique that accused his troops of lacking motivation, Zahir said his soldiers were prepared to fight Al Qaeda.
Waves of US planes last night dropped bombs on the deeply entrenched Al Qaeda troops, following a 24-hour period in which only one US warplane dropped bombs on the group.
At the front earlier yesterday, Haftagul said the US planes had deliberately held fire to allow 600 to 700 Afghan soldiers to get in place for the offensive. The mujahideen soldiers insisted on the pause following the deaths of three Afghan fighters in the Tora Bora region from an errant American bomb on Saturday.
Jalalabad Mayor Engineer Ghafar, who commands roughly 2,000 soldiers, said yesterday that he has spoken with US advisers recently who "want us to hurry to finish this job. They said, 'as soon as possible, in one week to 10 days.' "
Separately, US Marines set up a post about 12 miles from the southern city of Kandahar, part of the effort to secure the area and search for the missing Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. US troops, meanwhile, also entered the capital of Kabul and secured the old US Embassy.
In Washington, White House officials said yesterday that they may release a videotape that they said shows bin Laden clearly had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks. There has been hesitation about releasing the tape because US officials don't want to give bin Laden television airtime or reveal intelligence sources. Wolfowitz said the videotape is "disgusting" because it shows bin Laden reveling in the death of innocent civilians, but he wants it made public.
President Bush, speaking to reporters at the White House, said, "For those who see this tape, they realize that not only is he guilty of incredible murder, he has no conscience and no soul."
Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
