http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/320/nation/US_to_expand_its_ground_force+.shtml

US to expand its ground force

Troops to search for weapons of mass destruction

By John Donnelly, Globe Staff and Bryan Bender Globe Correspondent, 11/16/2001

WASHINGTON - The US commander of the Afghanistan war, General Tommy R. Franks, said yesterday that as US forces close in on Taliban leaders and Al Qaeda, additional ground forces will be deployed to work with southern opposition leaders and to hunt for signs of weapons of mass destruction.

In a possible intelligence coup, Northern Alliance opposition forces yesterday reportedly captured several senior Taliban leaders, a senior US official said.

''We have heard that the Northern Alliance may have come into possession of some Taliban leadership earlier today,'' the official told Reuters, adding that those captured did not include the top Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, or Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden, head of the anti-Western guerrilla network, Al Qaeda.

The official, who requested anonymity, said the Northern Alliance had informed Washington of the apparent capture.

But Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders gave no sign of giving up easily, despite their rapidly shrinking territory. Following a day of fierce US airstrikes, about 2,000 to 3,000 fighters held onto a lone city in the north, Kunduz, while the Taliban also retained control of their birthplace in the south, Kandahar.

Omar, the Taliban leader, defiantly said during an interview with the BBC Pashto service that the war eventually would lead to the ''extinction'' of the United States.

''The current situation in Afghanistan is related to a bigger cause that is the destruction of America,'' he said from an unknown location. The BBC asked the questions over a satellite phone through a Taliban intermediary, who passed them to Omar via a hand-held radio.

Indicating a fight to the death, Omar also said Taliban leaders would never consider joining a coalition government with their enemies. ''We prefer death than to be a part of an evil government,'' he said.

There were also indications that suspected terrorist bin Laden, who remains at large, would never surrender.

''Osama has already decided that death will be preferable to being arrested by America,'' a Taliban spokesman, Mullah Abdullah, told the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press.

From the Pentagon's perspective, finding bin Laden and his lieutenants, who are the only suspects identified as having directed the Sept. 11 attacks on America, was not in doubt.

''We're tightening the noose,'' said Franks, the US commander, as he outlined the expanded US mission in Afghanistan. ''It's a matter of time.''

Still, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned that may not happen soon.

''It's not possible electronically to detect everything at all times,'' he said. ''It's also possible to go across [a border] on a donkey, or a burro, a mule, a horse, a truck. I think we'll find him either there or in some other country. But one has to be realistic.''

Pakistan announced it was deploying additional troops along its 1,500-mile western border with Afghanistan to prevent Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders from slipping into the country.

''Our instructions are that nobody should cross the border,'' said Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider. ''If anybody does, he will be arrested.''

In Islamabad, United Nations officials were hoping to travel to Kabul possibly tomorrow to speak with members of the Northern Alliance about meeting other Afghan leaders in constructing a political settlement, said Francesc Vendrell, UN deputy special representative for Afghanistan.

US envoy James Dobbins and the Iranian interior minister, Abdolvahed Mousavi-Lari, were in Islamabad for talks with Pakistani officials about a future Afghan government.

Vendrell said the UN's assessment was that the political talks needed to happen quickly as the Taliban are ''in the process of disintegration, as an organized force and particularly as an organized administration.''

Franks said recent US airstrikes may have killed senior members of the Taliban regime and Al Qaeda, but he did not provide details of the attacks on two suspected safehouses in Kabul and Kandahar. Defense officials confirmed that a Predator pilotless aircraft fired a Hellfire missile into one of the targets.

Starting as soon as possible, Franks said, special operations forces will begin checking former sites held by Al Qaeda to look for evidence of weapons of mass destruction. On Wednesday, Franks said Pentagon officials reviewed two to three months of intelligence material related to potential locations and passed on that information to special forces.

Those covert troops will be ''checking those sites out as they fall under our control,'' he said, adding there were no results yet from any location.

Their rules of engagement were clear, Franks said: ''When they're threatened, when property is threatened, when they come in contact with enemy forces ... they destroy those forces.''

In the south, at least 100 US special operating forces met with anti-Taliban tribes for the first time, defense officials said. Franks initally said that they were providing advice and supplies and were calling in to pinpoint airstrikes. Asked about supplying weapons to the tribes, he said, ''Yes, they offer arms as well.''

''We are applying pressure in the vicinity of Kandahar,'' Franks said, adding that while the Taliban remained in control ''we do see signs of some fracturing there as well.''

A US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there were isolated gun battles in the streets of Kandahar yesterday as several anti-Taliban Pashtun tribes moved to positions near the city.

About 100 British troops arrived yesterday at Bagram airport north of Kabul to prepare the area for a humanitarian mission, the Ministry of Defense said.

In the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, commanders from ethnic Pashtun tribes, many of whom once supported the Taliban, said they would send a peace mission of tribal elders from six provinces to Kandahar in the next few days.

''Our message to commanders still with the Taliban is they should give up,'' said Abdul Khaliq, a supporter of the exiled king, Mohammed Zahir Shah, who wants a loya jirga - a grand council of tribal chiefs and elders - to decide Afghanistan's future government.

The northern city of Kunduz, Franks said, was ''infested'' with a ''hard-core'' mixture of fighters, including Taliban, Al Qaeda forces, and troops from other countries. ''The fighting has been fierce,'' Rumsfeld said.

The fluidity of the situation in Afghanistan was evident in several cities, including Kabul and Jalalabad.

Haji Qadeer, whose brother Abdul Haq was executed by the Taliban on a mission inside Afghanistan last month, swept back to the Jalalabad palace from which he was evicted five years earlier by the Taliban. A day earlier, reports said another former mujahideen group, led by former Taliban ally Maulvi Yunus Khalis, had taken control of Jalalabad.

In Kabul, factions in the Northern Alliance have already split the capital along ethnic lines, a possible sign the capital could be reverting to the patchwork divisions that sparked civil war in 1992 following the fall of the Soviet-installed government.

In Crawford, Texas, meanwhile, the war dominated the three-day summit between President Bush and the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, who strongly supports the US-led mission, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said.

Both leaders passed instructions on to their foreign ministers to press the United Nations on getting a political structure in place in Kabul. They also discussed opening the land bridge to the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif to allow humanitarian aid to pass through, Rice said.

''They were really reviewing the situation on the ground,'' Rice said. ''They were reviewing the progress of the Northern Alliance. They were sharing with each other information, what they knew about the situation on the ground, what they knew about the intentions of various parties. They talked about the importance of getting the political arrangements accelerated now, given the accelerating situation on the ground.''

Bush's spirits were lifted enormously by news of the recent military successes, and the rescue of two US aid workers, both Texans, the night before, aides said. At a dinner at the ranch on Wednesday, the atmosphere was livelier than it has been in weeks.

In Islamabad, there also were celebrations among eight foreign aid workers freed earlier in the week and flown by US helicopters to safety at a military air base outside the Pakistani capital yesterday morning. The workers were accused to proselytizing, a crime punishable by death under the Taliban.

Two Americans in the group, Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer, stayed yesterday at the home of US Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin. They spent their first day of freedom in three months taking a hot bath, visiting a beauty parlor, eating favorite meals, and ''hugging their parents,'' Chamberlin said.

Anne E. Kornblut in Texas and Yvonne Abraham in Islamabad, of the Globe Staff, contributed to this report. Material from wire services also was included.

-- Anonymous, November 16, 2001