Wednesday November 14 11:59 AM ET

Kandahar Said to Have Fallen; Hunt for Bin Laden Is On

By Sayed Salahuddin and Arshad Mohammed

KABUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Anti-Taliban forces claimed further dramatic victories Wednesday with the hard-line Afghan Islamists' final stronghold of Kandahar reported to have fallen as Washington prepared for a ``needle in a haystack'' hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who on Tuesday revealed that U.S. Special Forces were already operating in southern Afghanistan, said finding those responsible for September's mass killings on U.S. soil remained a difficult task despite Taliban losses.

The anti-Taliban Northern Alliance ambassador in neighboring Tajikistan said Kandahar, the Taliban's power center, had fallen to the opposition and tribal rebels.

``Today the forces of the Northern Alliance entered Kandahar,'' ambassador Said Ibrahim Hikmat said.

Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah earlier told Iran's state television: ``There is complete chaos in Kandahar. It's absolute confusion. The Taliban have lost control of the situation and no Taliban officials are to be found.''

The claims could not be independently verified but, if true, they would represent an enormous setback for the Taliban and the al Qaeda network of their guest bin Laden, blamed by Washington for the Sept. 11 attacks with hijacked airliners that killed more than 4,500 people in New York and Washington.

They followed the Northern Alliance's seizure of the capital Kabul and the domino-like fall or defection of towns and provinces that reduced the Taliban's control from 90 percent of the country to 20 percent in just five days.

International diplomats, outpaced by opposition victories in the field, galloped to keep up with the military advances as they sought to set up a broad-based government able to satisfy Afghanistan's neighbors and avoid an ethnic bloodbath.

In Kabul, the Northern Alliance, has refrained so far from the orgy of reprisal killings and bloody power battles among its disparate factions that accompanied its last takeover in the early 1990s.

But military analysts expected the Taliban, aided by al Qaeda, to take to Afghanistan's impenetrable mountains in a guerrilla war reminiscent of the hit-and-run campaigns that drove the occupying Soviet army from the country in 1989.

On day 39 of the U.S. bombing campaign to punish the Taliban for sheltering bin Laden, Rumsfeld said, ``It is, needless to say, gratifying to see the Taliban fleeing and the people of Afghanistan getting their country back.

``On the other hand, our task is to find the al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership and we still have that ahead of us. So, we have to be purposeful about that and recognize that it continues to be a difficult task.

``Finding handfuls of people is indeed like finding needles in a haystack and it's a complicated process.''

CHANCES OF CATCHING BIN LADEN BOOSTED -- EXPERTS

Experts on Afghanistan said the Taliban's collapse boosted U.S. prospects for hunting down Laden.

``The chances of him being betrayed, sold out or whatever are extremely high,'' Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid told Reuters from the Pakistani city of Lahore.

``There is tremendous ferment across the south now,'' said Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who has covered Afghanistan for 20 years and whose book on the Taliban has topped bestseller lists around the world for weeks.

``People are turning against the Taliban and there have been defectors from the Taliban who can be interviewed for a mine of information and intelligence on where bin Laden is.''

In other battlefield developments, an anti-Taliban group seized control of the eastern city of Jalalabad, an area which housed al Qaeda training camps, Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press said.

Four northeastern provinces also slipped from Taliban hands after local uprisings, officials and tribal leaders said.

``Now the Taliban have less than 20 percent of the territory of Afghanistan,'' opposition Northern Alliance Interior Minister Yunis Qanuni told Reuters.

World leaders were trying to assemble a multinational peacekeeping force and plans for a transitional government for a country racked by civil war since the former Soviet Union invaded on Christmas Day, 1979, to back communist rule in the Muslim country.

British troops could be sent to Afghanistan within days to maintain security as part of a stability force, said rime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush's staunchest ally in his war on terrorism.

``The main purpose of these troops would be in the context of multinational efforts to make safe the humanitarian supply routes now opening up as a result of military progress,'' Blair said.

Diplomats were converging on Afghanistan's southern neighbor, Pakistan, to hammer out post-Taliban rule.

U.N. envoy to Afghanistan Fransesc Vendrell was in the Pakistani capital Islamabad, waiting to go to Kabul to meet Northern Alliance leaders as soon as U.N. security officials give him clearance that it is safe.

He is expected to push a U.N. plan envisaging a two-year interim government bringing all ethnic groups under one umbrella with a multinational security force to protect them.

U.S. ENVOY SEEKS POST-TALIBAN GOVERNMENT

James Dobbins, the U.S. envoy to the Northern Alliance, was due in the Pakistani capital after talks in Rome with exiled King Zahir Shah, a potential figurehead in an interim government.

Iranian Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mousavi-Lari was also in Islamabad meeting Pakistan officials on Afghanistan's future -- a subject of previous disagreement because they had backed opposite sides in the civil war. That changed when Pakistan stopped supporting the Taliban after the September attacks.

The United Nations dispatched the first shipment of aid on Wednesday to northern Afghanistan from ex-Soviet Uzbekistan, officials said.

Aid agencies warn of a humanitarian disaster in the making with harsh winter looming and 3.4 million people, half the population of northern Afghanistan, depending on aid to survive.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said three of its expatriate staff had reached Kabul, the first to return since the Taliban asked all foreigners to leave in September.

In Kabul, the dawn call to prayers competed with the sound of music for the first time in five years as residents awoke to life after the Taliban, who imposed rigid constraints in line with their interpretation of Islam, including a ban on music.

Factions in the northern Alliance split the city along ethnic lines within hours of their entry -- a sign Kabul could revert to the patchwork divisions that sparked bloody power struggles when the same groups took over from the Soviet-installed government.

But most people seemed pleased.

``Everything is different today, it's 100 percent changed,'' said 35-year-old tire seller Sarfraz Hostai. ``We had so many problems before, but now we are free and we are waiting for our new government.''

The U.N. Security Council is considering a British and French drafted resolution Wednesday that would support a political blueprint drafted by Lakhdar Brahimi, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special envoy for Afghanistan.

Brahimi has suggested a ``coalition of the willing'' contribute multinational troops, which diplomats said could include Turkey, Jordan and Malaysia, along with European nations.

-- Anonymous, November 14, 2001