The US-led military campaign in Afghanistan is driving a wedge between the Taliban and al Qaeda network even though Osama bin Laden and Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar share common views, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a Chicago newspaper.
"Their organizations are no longer in lock-step," Rumsfeld said in an interview with the editorial board of the Chicago Sun-Times published in the paper's Sunday editions. "When things are as tough as they are, it stresses relationships, and they're stressed."
Rumsfeld said Omar's rhetoric was sounding more like bin Laden's extreme, threatening view of the world, the Sun-Times reported.
But asked whether having non-Afghan al Qaeda leaders calling the shots was causing tension, Rumsfeld replied, "That is clearly an issue. And some of the Afghans don't like that."
Al Qaeda is operating in 50 or 60 countries, yet too many US allies have been unwilling to freeze assets of groups believed linked to the terrorist organization, the Sun-Times editors said Rumsfeld told them.
"We've simply got to get help from more countries in freezing accounts of terrorist organizations so that they have trouble," the paper quoted Rumsfeld as saying.
Countries may be unwilling to freeze assets because they are not sure how to go about it, may have laws prohibiting government intervention in private financial matters or may want to avoid becoming a target of the terrorists themselves, Rumsfeld told the Sun-Times.
"They've decided that they will tolerate and look the other way to certain kinds of activities," he said. "They don't want to stick a stick in the alligator's eye and awaken him."
The paper said Rumsfeld declined to say if he would prefer to catch bin Laden dead or alive. Rumsfeld said there is a high probability that bin Laden is still in Afghanistan, but conceded that he did not know where he was or even whether he remains alive, the Sun-Times said.
"He could be in a tunnel we bombed, and we didn't even know it," Rumsfeld told the newspaper.
(Xinhua News Agency November 19, 2001)
