WASHINGTON, Nov 18: Despite rapid gains against the Taliban in the past week, top US officials said on Sunday the campaign to end terrorists’ ability to function in Afghanistan is far from over.
“This war is not over. It’ll continue for a while, until the Taliban power is totally cracked and other tribes in the south start to reassert control,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Fox television.
Toppling the Taliban is just a means to an end, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice added on NBC’s “Meet the Press”.
“It is absolutely the case that we wanted to loose the grip of the Taliban, but that was a means to an end,” she said.
“What we need to do is rout out the Al Qaeda terrorists. We need to make certain that Afghanistan cannot be a base for terrorist opportunities again,” she said.
“I can’t speak to precisely where Osama bin Ladin is, but we are narrowing this and we are putting the net around him,” Rice told CNN.
Asked whether the United States would turn its attention on Iraq once the Al Qaeda has been defeated, Rice said: “The president has made very clear that this is a broad war on terrorism, that you cannot be supportive of Al Qaeda and continue to harbour other terrorists.”
“We do not need the events of Sept 11 to tell us that this is a very dangerous man (President Saddam) who is a threat to his own people, a threat to the region, and a threat to us, because he is determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction,” she said.—AFP
Mr Powell said that the Northern Alliance had agreed to participate in UN-brokered talks about forming a power-sharing government in Afghanistan which can put a broad-based “interim government” in place soon, writes Masood Haider from New York.
“The purpose of the meeting would be to bring together a number of leaders representing different parts of Afghanistan, different ethnicities, different tribes, and see if we can get an interim government in place and then stand up a broader government over time,” Mr Powell said in an interview with ABC news programe This Week.”
The United States has pressured the Northern Alliance to share power with other factions — including Pakhtoons in the South - and to let the United Nations oversee assembly of a new government.
Mr Powell hoped the meeting organized by the top UN envoy for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, would take place in days but did not say where it would be held. “We’ve got to get this moving,” he said.
“The holdup had been the Northern Alliance,” Powell said, “and with this announcement today, we should be able to move forward quickly.” The breakthrough came as a result of meetings in the region between the Northern Alliance leaders and James Dobbins, the Bush administration’s special envoy for Central Asia.
Mr Brahimi has outlined plans for a two-year transitional government backed by a multinational security force.
Mr Powell hoped that the meeting can lead to the beginning of administrative control of Kabul in advance of a “more comprehensive, broad-based government.”
That, in turn, “may well equire some military presence on the ground” to ensure the delivery of humanitarian supplies or provide “a level of stability in the towns that are being liberated,” he said on ABC’s This Week.
Mr Powell also played down the direct role of Afghanistan’s exiled king, 86-year-old Mohammed Zahir Shah, in ruling the country.
“It seems to me that his role would continue to be symbolic as opposed to being the executive or the chief executive of the new government,” Mr Powell said.
Mr Powell said that he believed suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden was still in Afghanistan, though on the run from US airstrikes. “I have seen no intelligence or information to suggest” he has left, Mr Powell said.
“It’s getting harder for him to hide, as more and more territory is removed from the Taliban control,” Mr Powell said. “I don’t think there’s any country in the region that would be eager to give him guest privileges if he showed up.”
“This war is not over. It’ll continue for a while, until the Taliban power is totally cracked and other tribes in the South start to reassert control,” Mr Powell said.
The military campaign will continue until the United States accomplishes its goal of getting Osama and destroying his Al Qaeda terrorist network, Mr Powell said.
Once that is done, the United States will go after the network in all of the 50 countries it’s located in around the world, Mr Powell said.
“So let’s not see this as all suddenly coming to an end. A long-term campaign against terrorism will take years, and we’ll stick with it,” Mr Powell said.
Asked whether CIA was involved in helping the US forces in Afghanistan to locate Osama and his Al Qaeda network, Mr Powell said: “I cannot comment on any role being played by the CIA” in helping the US forces.
President Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press said: “We have no reason to believe that Osama has left Afghanistan.”
Asked whether US found Iraq in complicity with Al Qaeda based on information given to the US intelligence by agents in the Czech republic, Ms Rice said that the US does not need Sept 11 to reinforce Saddam Hussein’s role in acquiring weapons of mass destruction.