Taliban in Disarray; U.S. Rescues Aid Workers

KABUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Anti-Taliban forces pushed deeper into Afghanistan on Wednesday, forcing the hard-line Islamic militia to the south where control of their stronghold of Kandahar was apparently crumbling.

U.S. forces swooped in to rescue eight aid workers, including two Americans, who had been held by the Taliban since August and threatened with possible execution for allegedly propagating Christianity.

"Today we've got incredibly good news," President Bush said after the aid workers were plucked from Afghanistan by military helicopters and taken to Pakistan. "Our United States military rescued eight humanitarian workers who had been imprisoned in Afghanistan."

U.S. officials, determined to press the advantage, said they were prepared to send troops into the caves and mountains of southern Afghanistan in a guerrilla campaign to ferret out militant leader Osama bin Laden.

With battlefield advances outpacing political plans in the U.S. campaign to oust the Taliban for protecting the man blamed for September's attacks on New York and Washington, the United Nations Security Council endorsed a political blueprint for a post-Taliban government and pointed the way to a multinational security force to guard major cities.

U.N. aid trucks rolled into the landlocked Central Asian country after advances by the anti-Taliban opposition to provide vital relief to millions in danger of starving as winter closes in.

As U.S. special forces began spreading through southern Afghanistan, the Pentagon said it was too early to declare victory over the Taliban and bin Laden, blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks with hijacked airliners on New York and Washington that killed some 4,500 people.

But it did report bombing a building in Afghanistan where members of bin Laden's al Qaeda network of militants were gathered, killing a number of people.

A Taliban spokesman had earlier said that bin Laden and his protector, Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, were both safe in the country and repeated that the Islamic militia would not turn their "guest" over to Washington.

Just one day after opposition forces moved into the Afghan capital of Kabul, confusion reigned over the fate of Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city and a Taliban bastion.

The Northern Alliance ambassador in neighboring Tajikistan said the southern city had fallen to the opposition and tribal rebels. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he had no information on whether anti-Taliban forces had taken control of the airfield there.

Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem told a Pentagon news briefing anti-Taliban groups were rebelling against Taliban control near Kandahar, but he said the outcome was not yet clear.

Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah earlier said the city was sliding into anarchy.

"There is complete chaos in Kandahar. It's absolute confusion. The Taliban have lost control of the situation and no Taliban officials are to be found," he told Iran state television.

The claims could not be independently verified. But if true, they would represent an enormous setback for the Taliban and al Qaeda, which have seen numerous towns and provinces turn to the opposition, reducing the Taliban's control from 90 percent of the country to 20 percent in just five days.

In a sign of the Taliban's weakening hold over the country, U.S. officials confirmed that three U.S. special operations helicopters had landed in a field near Ghazni, Afghanistan, about 50 miles southwest of Kabul and picked up the eight aid workers.

The foreigners -- two Americans, two Australians and four Germans -- were members of the German-based Christian charity Shelter Now International and had been awaiting trial in Kabul after being detained on Aug. 5 for allegedly spreading Christianity to Muslim Afghans, an offense punishable by death under the Taliban's strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Bush said U.S. forces had cooperation on the ground from groups including the International Red Cross. U.S. officials did not give more details of the rescue operation, although Rumsfeld said it "involved many people and several entities."

Stufflebeem, a top operations officer on the military's Joint Staff, said the U.S. military still had to find and destroy al Qaeda -- an operation Rumsfeld described as "finding needles in a haystack."

"The U.S. is prepared if necessary to conduct a guerrilla war or a counter-guerrilla war" to hunt the Taliban and al Qaeda forces in the caves of southern Afghanistan if they flee there, he told reporters.

Experts on Afghanistan said the Taliban's collapse would boost U.S. prospects for hunting down bin Laden.

"The chances of him being betrayed, sold out or whatever are extremely high," Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid told Reuters from the Pakistani city of Lahore.

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, who earlier on Wednesday said the Taliban were in flight "virtually all over the country," said conditions were "fluid" and that he believed bin Laden was also moving in an effort to escape capture.

"The circumstances on the ground have changed dramatically just in a matter of days and areas that were probably safe for him 48 or 72 hours ago are no longer safe for him," Cheney said on CBS' "60 Minutes II" program aired on Wednesday.

With the United States preparing to establish special military courts to try foreign nationals accused of terrorism, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft described the Sept. 11 hijackers and their supporters as "war criminals" who could be subject to such justice.

"Foreign terrorists who commit war crimes in the United States are not entitled to, do not deserve the protection of the American Constitution," Ashcroft told a news conference.

In other battlefield developments, an anti-Taliban group seized control of the eastern city of Jalalabad, an area which housed al Qaeda training camps, the Afghan Islamic Press said.

Four northeastern provinces also slipped from Taliban hands after local uprisings, officials and tribal leaders said, while in the far North opposition forces were prepared to take the enclave of Kunduz after pro-Taliban Pakistani and Arab fighters were evacuated by plane.

A U.S. official said on Wednesday that military jets and a CIA unmanned plane equipped with anti-tank Hellfire missiles had destroyed a building where al Qaeda members were believed to be gathered -- although the official said none of those killed had been identified.

World leaders were seeking a multinational peacekeeping force and a transitional government for a country racked by civil war since 1979, when the former Soviet Union invaded to back communist rule in the Muslim country.

The U.N. Security Council on Wednesday unanimously endorsed an Afghan political plan envisaging a two-year interim government bringing all ethnic groups under one umbrella with a multinational security force to protect them.

U.N. envoy to Afghanistan Fransesc Vendrell was expected to travel from Islamabad to Kabul on Friday to discuss the proposal with Northern Alliance leaders.

James Dobbins, the U.S. envoy to the Northern Alliance, arrived in the Pakistani capital after talks in Rome with exiled King Zahir Shah, a potential figurehead in an interim government.

Cheering Afghans greeted a barge loaded with U.N. aid on the Amu Darya river, reopening a vital relief route from ex-Soviet Uzbekistan over the river, once a main trade route but closed for years by nervous Uzbek officials.

The aid came as relief agencies warned of a humanitarian disaster in the making with winter looming and 3.4 million people depending on aid to survive.

In Kabul, factions in the northern Alliance split the city along ethnic lines within hours of their entry -- a sign the capital could revert to the patchwork divisions that sparked earlier bloody power struggles.

But they have thus far refrained from the orgy of reprisal killings and bloody power battles that accompanied their last takeover in the early 1990s.

I find that hard to believe.

I am continually amazed at what wusses the Taliban are turning out to be. Apparently the "fight until you've shed your last drop of blood for Allah" is total BS. Tough guys when it comes to beating and killing defenseless Afghan women, and children, and planning sneak attacks on Americans.

I think that if these people, and others around the world like them knew the meaning of the Scripture "I require mercy, not sacrifice," they would not have been in the predicament which they were in, and just miraculously extracted from, through force of arms, and the risking of the lives of brave men.

but "Rescue" is a stretch.

I know what you mean, Reuters has had such a pro American bent all thru this war, they might as well been a branch of the military all their own. < / SARCASM! >

Can you provide a link to your source please.

How in the hell can we track men riding in a truck but not be able to detect and destroy pro-Taliban Pakistani and Arab fighters who were being evacuated by plane?????
What's going on here? Notice that it doesn't say they 'got away by plane.' It doesn't even say that they had anything to DO with the plane. It's in passive voice: they 'were evacuated. That means somebody else did the evacuating. Who? Why? And note also that it says the Alliance was prepared to take the town AFTER (only after?) these Pro-Talibab Arabs had gone. If this little smidgen of news is true, then "somebody" (guess who?) went out of their way to save the skins of these PRO-Taliban Arabs. Why?
I sure hope here's a good reason for this -- like they were agents we had planted inside the Taliban ranks maybe. But my cynicism tells me that these "Arabs" got some very, very, very special treatment for some very secret and no doubt very shady reason. Something's going on.
If it blows up in our faces pretty soon and gets a lot of people killed, we'll know it was a CIA op.

The post at http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/fr/570997/posts#52 seems to suggest that it was an exchange deal, where we swapped them for the hostages.

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