US President Bush vowed on Saturday to pursue the US-led war on terror into 2002 as Pakistan began thinning out troops patrolling its western border with Afghanistan in search of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda fighters.
Meanwhile, a senior Afghan official called on America to end the nearly three-month-long bombardment of his country, saying bin Laden and his cohorts were no longer there.
Pakistan began withdrawing troops from the Afghan border in response to rising tensions with India whose troops are building up on its eastern frontier.
The two nuclear-armed rivals have massed troops along their borders in the biggest such build-up in 15 years following a December 13 attack on the Indian parliament, for which New Delhi blames two Pakistan-based militant groups fighting Indian rule in the disputed Kashmir region. The attack left 14 people dead, including the five assailants.
Bush, in telephone calls on Saturday, urged leaders of both countries to calm their tensions. The White House did not say if Bush addressed the issue of Pakistani troop removal from the Afghan border, but any such depletion of troops would hinder the search for fleeing al Qaeda fighters.
Separately, in his weekly radio address to the American people from his ranch in Texas, Bush said next year would require ``our sustained commitment to the war'' against terrorism.
``We cannot know how long this struggle will last. But it can end only one way: in victory for America and the cause of freedom,'' Bush said, adding his war extended beyond Afghanistan. ``The world should know that this administration will not blink in the face of danger and will not tire when it comes to completing the missions that we said we would do.''
BIN LADEN IN PESHAWAR?
In Kabul, Afghan Defense Minister Mohammad Fahim said bin Laden, the world's most wanted man who is suspected of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks on America that killed nearly 3,300 people, had probably left Afghanistan for the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar, and urged an end soon to US bombing raids.
With the destruction of the Taliban and bin Laden's al Qaeda network in Afghanistan, there was little further need for US bombing, Fahim said in the highest-level suggestion so far that it was time to end the aerial strikes.
A spokesman for the US diplomatic mission in Kabul said the United States had received no request from the Afghan government to stop bombing.
The fundamentalist Taliban government, which ruled Afghanistan with an iron rod for five years, incurred the wrath of the United States when it refused to hand over bin Laden after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Most hideouts of the Taliban and bin Laden have been bombed to bits, but the air raids, that began on Oct. 7, have continued and stray US bombs have been blamed for scores of civilian deaths in recent days.
Fahim said it was likely that bin Laden had escaped the US dragnet and was in Peshawar. ``After fleeing from Tora Bora there is a strong probability that Osama is in Peshawar,'' he said.
``Osama is out of our control. To a large extent it depends on Pakistan. America can pursue him with the help of the Pakistani government,'' Fahim added.
Tora Bora is a mountainous region in eastern Afghanistan, riddled with caves, and was thought to be the last redoubt of bin Laden's al Qaeda network, and perhaps for the Saudi-born militant millionaire himself.
US WARPLANES HIT TALIBAN BUILDING
Pakistan's Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar said he could not rule out the possibility that bin Laden had crossed the 1,500-mile porous border into Pakistan's rugged and lawless tribal areas, but dismissed such reports as mere speculation.
``I can't say it is impossible,'' he told Reuters. ``Anyone can speculate. But that is not based on concrete information.
The United States says it has no idea of the whereabouts of bin Laden, who taunted Washington in a videotape apparently shot earlier this month and aired Wednesday.
But Bush said the Islamic militant was the conflict's clear loser. ``This is a guy who, three months ago, was in control of a country,'' he said. ``Now he's maybe in control of a cave.''
In Washington, a Defense Department spokesman confirmed that the US warplanes had bombed a Taliban leadership building near the Afghan town of Gardeyz on Friday. An assessment of the damage was not yet available.
In a dress rehearsal for an international security force due to arrive in Kabul in early January, British troops on Saturday staged their first joint patrol with Afghan security forces in the battered Afghan capital.
Fifteen Royal Marine commandos briefly patrolled streets around the Zarnagar Park with nine armed police from the Afghan Interior Ministry, before being whisked away in an army truck from a crowd of curious onlookers.
``This is the first multinational security operation,'' said Royal Marine Lieutenant Colonel Richard Spencer as the patrol moved down a street lined with carpet sellers. ``It's all about reassurance and presence.''
3,000 FOREIGN TROOPS
The week-old interim administration has yet to sign a deal on the terms of deployment for the UN-mandated International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
But Fahim said on Friday he had reached an agreement with the British commander of ISAF on the rough size of the force, its role and the bases it would occupy. Under the agreement, he said, 3,000 foreign troops would be allowed in the country.
Interim leader Hamid Karzai has welcomed the force, as have several commanders, tribal elders and ordinary Afghans eager to see peacekeepers prevent a return to the anarchy of the 1990s.
In the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the local Afghan commander said that one of eight wounded foreign al Qaeda fighters holed up in a hospital had been arrested by US forces, after he emerged from a barricaded ward to seek treatment.
The wounded al Qaeda fighters barricaded themselves into their ward on Tuesday, a day after shooting broke out in the hospital when their Afghan opponents tried to flush them out.
Since then they have threatened to blow themselves up with their own grenades rather than surrender.
The Defense Department spokesman said US forces in Afghanistan are now holding more than 120 Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners at a detention facility in Kandahar.
Another eight prisoners are being held on board the amphibious assault ship USS Peleliu in the northern Arabian Sea.
The United States has begun preparations to bring al Qaeda and Taliban detainees to the US Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba's southeast tip for more interrogation. Prisoners also face the possibly of military tribunals at the base, one of the last front lines left from the Cold War.
As Afghanistan prepares to rebuild its shattered infrastructure and bombed out cities, Information and Culture Minister Raheen Makhdoom said the nation's new authorities also hope to rebuild the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan destroyed by the Taliban.
That destruction was seen by the rest of the world as a desecration of Afghan's ancient culture and history.
(China Daily December 30, 2001)
