March 20, 2002	Wednesday	Muharram 5, 1423

NEW YORK, March 19: American and Afghan officials warned that there were still pockets of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in southeastern Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan and that new military operations would be needed to defeat them.

In a report from the frontlines the New York Times said that the American commanders at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, headquarters for an 11-day battle in the southeastern mountains that ended on Wednesday, have eased away from earlier estimates that the battle could prove to be the decisive engagement of the five-month-old war.

Their position now is that many of the perhaps 1,000 fighters once thought to be surrounded during the first battle, in Shah-i- Kot, may have slipped away as the battle ended, setting the scene for further American-led assaults, the paper said.

Among a score of American officers interviewed at Bagram by the Times on the battlefield at Shah-i-Kot and at the American base at Kandahar, where many of the combat troops at Shah-i-Kot have been repositioned, the constant view has been that the Taliban and Al Qaeda suffered a grievous blow in that battle.

Privately some officers are sceptical of claims by senior commanders that 500 to 800 fighters were killed, saying the number may have been far lower.

But even these officers agree that the overwhelming American firepower deployed taught the enemy a lesson it will not be eager to repeat.

All the same, American and Afghan briefings for reporters during the current mopping-up phase in Shah-i-Kot, which concluded its fifth day on Sunday, have emphasized the work still to be done before Afghanistan can be considered secure against guerilla threat.

Without specifying time frames, American spokesmen have said that military operations are open-ended, and implied that many of the 5,300 American troops now in Afghanistan could remain for months, or even longer.