NEW YORK, Dec 2: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Sunday that he was convinced that Pakistan did not fly any airplanes or helicopters into Afghanistan to evacuate any Pakistani prisoners from there.

In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Rumsfeld, who was asked to respond to charges by the Northern Alliance about Pakistani planes flying into Jalalabad to evacuate Pakistanis, said: “According to my information neither Pakistan nor any other country flew any planes into Afghanistan to evacuate anybody.”

He said Pakistan was cooperating fully with the United States in its campaign against terrorism as it had deployed crack troops on the border with Afghanistan to stop anyone from escaping into Pakistan.

He said the US had been monitoring the skies in Afghanistan as skillfully as possible and that he had not seen any evidence of any planes flying to evacuate anybody to Pakistan or any other country.

Mr Rumsfeld said on Sunday no one in Taliban or al-Qaeda leadership would be allowed to escape or make a deal to escape.

“They have one choice: either surrender or die,” he said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” programme.

Rumsfeld suggested that he anticipated the US campaign in Afghanistan to last for months until all of the terrorist networks were destroyed in the country even after the Taliban and the al-Qaeda leadership, including Osama bin Laden, was captured or killed.

Commenting on reports that the Taliban leadership is dug in Kandahar to fight the opposition forces, Rumsfeld said he hoped the Taliban would surrender but emphasized no one will be allowed to escape. US military forces will do “whatever is necessary” to root out the Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists from their cave hide-outs, Rumsfeld said

He acknowledged the difficulty of locating and penetrating cave systems, deep in the mountains of Afghanistan, that are multilayered, sophisticated and self-sustaining.

The decision has not been made whether US ground forces will be sent on a cave-by-cave manhunt. For now, the US-led campaign is relying on airstrikes near Kandahar, the Taliban’s last major stronghold, and in the mountains south of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, and hoping $25 million in reward money will provide Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts.

Asked whether poison gas would be pumped into the caves, Rumsfeld noted that the Northern Alliance forces used flooding to force the surrender of the last Taliban hold-outs in a prison fortress near Mazar-i-Sharif in the north.

“I guess one will do whatever it is necessary to do,” Rumsfeld said. “If people will not surrender then they’ve made their choice.”

Rumsfeld said Pentagon officials do not know exactly how many Taliban fighters remain in and around Kandahar, only that they number in the thousands. “The remaining task is a particularly dirty and unpleasant one,” Rumsfeld said. “We expect that there will be casualties, we expect that there will be people captured.”

He said the main barrier to bringing in forces from other nations to assist the US campaign was the opposition of Afghan anti-Taliban officials. “We are very eager to have the right kind of help,” he said.

It has been difficult to persuade the Northern Alliance to allow non-American troops into their areas of control, Rumsfeld said.

Commenting on the situation in Israel Mr Rumsfeld expressed doubts about whether Palestinian President Yasser Arafat had “good control” over the conflict with Israel.

Rumsfeld said Arafat “is not a particularly strong leader, and I don’t know that he has good control over the Palestinian situation.”

“He has not ever delivered anything for the Palestinian people throughout history,” Rumsfeld said. “His record is not particularly impressive.”

The comments came after Palestinian suicide bombings killed at least 25 people in Israel over the weekend. Israel and the United States have urged the Palestinians to rein in militants and put those responsible for the attacks on trial.