WASHINGTON, Nov 7: US efforts to coordinate with rebel forces in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban are gradually expanding but face more pitfalls, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on Tuesday.

“It is not going to be a steady march forward across a front. It is going to be probes and pushes and successes and steps back. That is the nature of it, and I think we just have to face that fact,” he said.

As an example of the unsteady progress, Rumsfeld said US special forces pulled a prominent tribal leader out of southern Afghanistan for consultations, although he denied the chieftain had been in Taliban custody.

Rumsfeld said Hamid Karzai, an exiled tribal chief who had been in Afghanistan to rally opposition to the Taliban, “undoubtedly” will go back to southern Afghanistan to resume his efforts against the Taliban.

“To my knowledge, he was not detained or held by the Taliban,” Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news conference. “It was a very sensible arrangement whereby he requested to be extracted for a period, and we cooperated.”

Whatever the circumstance of his departure, Karzai was one of two key opposition figures the United States has counted on to stir up trouble for the Taliban and to organize efforts to form a replacement government.

The other, Abdul Haq, entered Afghanistan last month and was captured and executed by the Taliban.

Karzai and his band of armed supporters battled Taliban forces last week in the southern province of Uruzgan, with the two sides offering widely conflicting accounts of the fighting. The Taliban said members of Karzai’s group were killed, and that Karzai was rescued by a US helicopter.

Karzai’s brother Ahmed confirmed the gunbattle, but said his brother and his men made it to safety.

Rumsfeld said Karzai was flown out of Afghanistan on Sunday with a small number of senior supporters and fighters. He said US forces had been supplying ammunition to Karzai’s fighters before the extraction.

At his news conference, Rumsfeld said there was no telling how long it would take for anti-Taliban forces to succeed.

He declined to say whether the opposition forces in northern Afghanistan would ultimately succeed.—AP