Forces declare victory at Tora Bora: But bin Laden not in area,

Dec. 16 — After weeks of fighting and relentless U.S. bombing in Afghanistan’s eastern White Mountains, U.S.-backed tribal forces declared victory Sunday in an all-out assault on remaining al-Qaida fighters. But Osama bin Laden himself could not be found, and a senior commander said he had fled and was no longer in the area. U.S. officials, who had appeared confident they had cornered bin Laden, conceded they did not know where he was but said U.S. forces wouldn’t rest until they tracked him down.

HAZRAT ALI, a senior commander of alliance of eastern tribes, told NBC News’ Jim Avila in Tora Bora that the battle for the region was over.

Ali said the alliance fighters had captured about 25 al-Qaida fighters and were holding them in the mountains. They were all that were left after more than 200 bin Laden loyalists were killed in a pitched battle Sunday, he said.

Jubilant eastern alliance forces chanted “Al-Qaida is finished! Al-Qaida is finished!”

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell welcomed the news but said, “Our work is not done. There are lots of al-Qaida cells around the world that we have to go after.”

Later, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Powell said the United States had no reason to believe that bin Laden “has been captured or killed. He might be in that area, where the eastern alliance forces are closing in; he might be somewhere else.”

</b The general in charge of the war also backed off earlier statements by U.S. officials that they had picked up bin Laden’s voice last week on short-range radio in the Tora Bora area.

But U.S. officials stressed that American forces would hunt down bin Laden and senior Taliban and al-Qaida leaders.

“We’re not leaving till we get the job done,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told U.S. troops on a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Sunday.

Rumsfeld also tried to temper the claims of victory, saying he expected more fighting in Tora Bora as pockets of al-Qaida fighters try to escape.

NBC correspondent Suzanne Malveaux said in Washington that the Bush administration would watch Tora Bora for a couple days before declaring victory in the region.

Still, a victory against al-Qaida would mark a turning point in the U.S. campaign against al-Qaida; bin Laden, the Saudi-born militant accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States; and their protectors, the militant Islamist Taliban militia.

Ali told NBC that his fighters had taken possession of bin Ladin’s cave in Tora Bora, but of bin Laden himself, there was no sign.

Mohammed Zaman, defense chief of the eastern alliance, said that would not prevent his fighters from completing a mopping-up operation.

“Osama bin Laden is not here,” he told The Associated Press, but “we are going to search the mountains meter by meter.”

Zaman said several hundred of the routed al-Qaida men might be on the run toward the border with Pakistan, only miles south of the caves and tunnels of Tora Bora. The eastern forces were pursuing the fleeing fighters, he said.

Al-Qaida’s only way out would be to retreat through dense forest, but U.S. B-52 bombers pounded the woods with incendiary bombs Sunday, and flames leapt from the trees, the AP reported.

Almost simultaneously with the tribal declaration of victory, U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld arrived triumphantly near Kabul, the capital, becoming the first senior U.S. official to visit Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban.

Rumsfeld has been touring several countries in central Asia this weekend, but his visit to Afghanistan had been kept a secret. U.S. fighter jets screamed through the sky above the Bagram airbase near Kabul before his plane touched down, Reuters reported.

Rumsfeld sat down to talks with Hamid Karzai, who will head an interim government that takes power next week. Karzai thanked Rumsfeld for U.S. help in defeating the Taliban, Reuters reported, while Rumsfeld reassured Karzai that the United States had no designs on Afghan territory.

Rumsfeld said he told Karzai that “from the very beginning, we have tried to make it clear that our operation here was not against Afghanistan, against the people, against a religion. It was against terrorism.”

Powell said the United States would open a mission in Kabul on Monday to begin helping the Afghan people rebuild.

Intense U.S. bombing in support of the eastern alliance’s final assault demonstrated that the arrival of Eid al-Fitr, the festival that celebrates the end of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, was unlikely to slow the U.S. search for bin Laden.

B-52 bombers raced through the skies Sunday, dropping huge bombs on suspected al-Qaida positions through the night and into the morning.

Speaking Saturday to the AP, a U.S. official said U.S. forces believed that they had detected bin Laden giving orders over short-range radio in the Tora Bora area during the past week. The official confirmed a report last week by NBC News that the voice on the radio matched bin Laden’s.

But on Sunday, Gen. Tommy Franks, the U.S. commander of the war, backed off those statements.

“We have certainly been receiving an awful lot of transmission traffic,” Franks told ABC’s “This Week.” Referring to bin Laden, he said Sunday that “we’re not sure whether it’s UBL or not.”

There was no immediate indication of how the Afghan commanders’ report that bin Laden was no longer in the region would affect U.S. military plans.

U.S. troops have been scouring caves captured from al-Qaida, bin Laden’s terrorist network, for documents and other evidence. Rumsfeld said Saturday that the missions had led to several arrests of suspected al-Qaida operatives in foreign countries. He did not elaborate.

Sunday, Rumsfeld said U.S. forces were garnering useful intelligence from a site they searched over the weekend just east of Camp Rhino, a U.S. base near Kandahar in the south. Rumsfeld said the location, Tarnak Farm, was being searched for evidence that it was a site for Taliban or al-Qaida work on chemical, biological or radiation weapons.

Officials told NBC’s Norah O’Donnell, who was traveling with Rumsfeld in Afghanistan, that potentially “significant” documents and materials were being studied. But they stressed that no actual weapons of mass destruction had been found.

We were told at the beginning of this that there were things we would know about, and things we would never know about. I think the status of UBL is one of those things we will never know about.

There is work to be done, there are terrorist cells in some 60 countries that MUST be wiped out and as long as UBL is "out there" the fight will continue.

Do I think we'll be struck again? Yes. Do I know when? Yes, right before we wipe them from the face of the earth.

I agree, osama-yo-mama is toast. Reduced to a steaming pile of smoking protoplasm seeping back under the rock from whence he came.

Where is Mullah Omar? Where is the rest of the senior Al Qaeda leadership? Hell! Where is the rest of the senior Taliban leadership? This thing is a long way from over...

You know, the thing that bothers me about this strange absence of Taliban leadership, is that we've killed only one guy that was close to Bin Laden. The one eyed guy who was the doctor or something. How is it, with all the state of the art technology that our military has, and the fact that Bin Laden has radios and a cell phone, that we can't find him?

We might as well have had John Walker tell us where he was this whole time. For the good the intelligence we have received up to now we might as well be looking for Unicorns, Bigfoot, and the Lochness Monster. Heck, let's toss Elvis into the mix.

How is it that Bin Laden can make David Copperfield look like an amateur with his own disappearing act? My opinion is that Bin Laden had help. A lot of it, and I'm willing to go out on a limb here and point a finger at the UN. Had we just walked in, and didn't give these people time to surrender, instead of playing this waiting game, we wouldn't have this mess.

Maybe this will teach our people something about how it is the Taliban works. We were stupid to let these people surrender to us. Total Annihilation is the only way to ensure victory, and guarantee the capture or Death of this madman.

A lot this is a byproduct of the strategy of using a proxy army to conduct ground operations. The Northern Alliance is more interested securing and running the country then they are in pursuing Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership. The Eastern Alliance are basically our mercenaries at this point, and the sympathetic Pashtun tribes to the south are interested in shielding the Taliban.

We might have captured more people and intellegence had we used our own ground forces and invaded Afghanistan and attempted to occupy at least portions of Afghanistan. But then their would have been many more US casualties. It is hard to say how many because we don't really have an accurate count of the casualties the Alliance has suffered on our behalf.

I think bin Laden is with Allah right now, ie in what Christians call hell.

But in case I am wrong, they are quite right to continue to look for him, or his body, here below.

I think he may have been hit near Kandahar on Nov. 26, and his body might not even have been identified if it was just one of a number which were in pieces there...

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