Forces led by former Kandahar governor Gul Agha said they were battling hundreds of Arab fighters entrenched just south of the city’s airport, while another Pashtun tribal leader, Hamid Karzai, said Sunday night that his forces were 20 miles north of the city.
Karzai said he did not plan to fight for Kandahar. He said he had not engaged in a single skirmish since heading south from Uruzgan province Friday night. “We are not going to attack,” he said. “We want it to fall through a popular movement.”
Khalid Pashtoon, an aide to Agha, said his forces fought sporadically with Arabs loyal to Osama bin Laden, staving off four counterattacks. “They know they have no choice,” Pashtoon said of the Arabs. “They are fighting to the death.” The rebel claims could not be independently confirmed.
U.S. Marines who control an air base about 70 miles southwest of Kandahar, meanwhile, were reinforced by more attack helicopters flying into Afghanistan from the USS Bataan. Though the base is within striking distance of Kandahar, military officials declined to say what role U.S. forces might play in an assault on the city.
Rumsfeld: Dirty task ahead
In the United States, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the American military could resort to unorthodox measures against the Taliban and members of bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network.
“We’re entering a very dangerous aspect of this conflict,” Rumsfeld said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “The remaining task is a particularly dirty and unpleasant one.”
Rumsfeld noted that opposition forces in the city of Mazar-e Sharif flooded a tunnel used by Al Qaeda fighters. “One will do whatever it is necessary to do,” he said. “If people will not surrender, then they’ve made their choice.”
Although 1,500 to 2,000 U.S. military personnel are in Afghanistan, military commanders have not decided whether to launch a cave-by-cave search for bin Laden, the alleged mastermind in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.
Rumsfeld said Pentagon officials do not know exactly how many pro-Taliban fighters remain in Kandahar, only that there are thousands. He warned that they are “the most determined and the toughest fighters” and said the final battle for the city could be bloody.
“We expect that there will be casualties; we expect that there will be people captured,” he said.
Speaking on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said the U.S. military has put enormous pressure on Kandahar’s defenders. “Their options are being limited,” he said.
Despite President Bush’s suggestion that Iraq might be a future target in the campaign against terrorism, Powell insisted that the administration remains focused on Afghanistan.
“The president has made no decision,” Powell said. “And moreover, none of the president’s advisers . . . have made, individually or collectively, recommendations yet to the president as to what we should do in the next phase.”
But Iraqi President Saddam Hussein “should be worried” about his future, Powell said. “He is totally isolated within the international community.”
Bush has called on Hussein to readmit inspectors to determine whether Iraq is developing weapons of mass destruction, but again was rebuffed by Hussein’s government.
Ashcroft defends tribunals
Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft defended the administration’s anti-terrorist efforts at home, including the president’s call for military tribunals to try foreign terror suspects and the assignment of National Guard personnel to the U.S. border with Canada.
Ashcroft said the guard will relieve customs officials overwhelmed by the increased number of inspections since Sept. 11. “This is not militarizing our border with Canada,” Ashcroft said on “Fox News Sunday.”
“To give you an idea, we have a border half that size with Mexico. We’ve got 9,000 people manning that border. We have twice the length with Canada, and we have about 500 people manning the border,” he said.
Ashcroft, who on Thursday will testify before a Senate committee probing the administration’s anti-terrorism initiatives, dismissed criticisms of a plan to give special visas and possibly citizenship to foreigners willing to provide information about terrorists.
“Every person in America has to make a decision whether they’re going to help us to find the terrorists and help us prevent the killing of innocent American lives, or whether they’re going to stand idly by in the face of evil,” Ashcroft said.
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In Germany, the UN-brokered conference on Afghanistan’s future moved slowly forward, with four Afghan factions in Bonn considering a draft resolution setting up an interim administration of up to 30 people, an international security force, and a Supreme Court.
The document put forward by UN representative Lakhdar Brahimi also calls for former King Mohammed Zahir Shah to convene a traditional tribal council that would set up a transitional administration to govern for two years before democratic elections.
None of the delegations has submitted a formal list of names to participate in the interim administration. “The missing link is the list of names,” said Ahmad Fawzi, a UN spokesman. Without consensus, any agreement reached in Germany may fall apart in Afghanistan.
“We want to produce a paper that is worth the paper it is written on,” Fawzi said.
U.S. disputes missed targets
In eastern Afghanistan, a provincial military official said U.S. warplanes had struck an anti-Taliban headquarters on Sunday, killing eight people. A day earlier, the official said U.S. bombs had killed scores of civilians in four villages.
But Lt. Col. Mark Compton of the U.S. Central Command said the jets had struck their intended targets around the Tora Bora cave complex believed to be a potential bin Laden hideout.
It was unclear whether the four villages were being used by Al Qaeda or Taliban forces. “The United States regrets any loss of innocent civilian lives,” Compton said. “We will continue, however, to destroy Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership and the places they do business.”
Tribal leaders said U.S. bombing was intense Sunday around Kandahar, and observers along the Pakistani border noted an increase in the number of jets headed north toward the city.
In Pakistan, an Afghan tribal leader said he had been negotiating with members of the Taliban cabinet over a possible surrender. Abdul Khaliq said he met with 20 Taliban leaders, including Justice Minister Mullah Nuruddin Turabi, in the Pakistani border town of Chaman and told them they would be granted mercy if they relinquished power. The Taliban officials, in turn, said they would return to Kandahar “to meet other commanders and convince them,” Khaliq said.
Bob Kemper reported from Washington and Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah from Quetta, Pakistan. Tribune news services contributed to this report.