Anti-Taliban Commanders Issue a New Ultimatum

After a day of intense negotiation and heavy bombing, Afghan tribal commanders said Wednesday that they have given hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters a new ultimatum: Climb down from their mountain hide-out, surrender themselves and their weapons and hand over Osama bin Laden, or face further assault.

“We want Osama alive,” commander Hazrat Ali said. “If they don’t give us Osama, we are preparing ourselves for a big offensive.”

But the anti-Taliban leadership made a similar demand Tuesday, winning a promise of surrender from the Al Qaeda defenders, only to see the deal fall through.

Ali, a military chief in northeastern Afghanistan, spent Wednesday negotiating with Al Qaeda fighters and people he described as U.S. representatives at a remote lookout post in a dusty swath of mountain long controlled by Bin Laden’s terror network.

The U.S. continued its airstrikes overnight and this morning on the remnants of Bin Laden’s forces.

Pentagon officials said Wednesday that there is no evidence that Bin Laden has escaped from Afghanistan, but they conceded that they do not know for sure that he is with the Al Qaeda defenders here at Tora Bora.

“We do not have pinpoint precision as to his whereabouts,” Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said in Washington. “If we did, we would have him.”

The Pentagon also reported Wednesday that an Air Force B-1 bomber flying a long-range combat mission to Afghanistan crashed in the Indian Ocean near the island of Diego Garcia. All four crew members were rescued, Pentagon officials said. The cause of the crash was under investigation.

It wasn’t clear why the earlier surrender agreement with Al Qaeda members fell apart. Some opposition fighters said the group made last-minute demands that the anti-Taliban forces were unwilling to meet. Others said that confidence in the cease-fire was chipped away by overnight attacks from a U.S. gunship or that Washington meddled in the talks.

The complaints from the opposition forces demonstrated the delicate nature of the U.S. strategy of fighting the ground war mostly by proxy. Although Pentagon officials were careful not to offend their allies, they made little effort to hide their frustration.

“It’s a very complex situation on the ground,” Clarke said. “You’re not dealing with set entities or one large group of people on either side. You’re dealing with factions within factions, so there are lots of talks and discussions, and some people use the word negotiations.”

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated that the war is far from over. “We still have a long way to go,” he told a Pentagon briefing. “We have gone into this battle with the intent of eliminating the Al Qaeda leadership, eliminating the Taliban leadership and leaving behind an Afghanistan that is free from terrorists operating in their territory. There is still work to be done in that.”

U.S. officials have said they will oppose any surrender deal that would allow Al Qaeda members to go free. But Afghan tribal elders have said Al Qaeda prisoners should be handed over to the international community, not U.S. authorities. “Americans have been bad for our negotiations,” Afghan commander Haji Kalan Mir said.

Pace said U.S. forces have only one prisoner at this time, John Walker Lindh, an American citizen who fought with the Taliban in a prison uprising near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif. He said U.S. intelligence officers have had access to some other prisoners held by anti-Taliban forces.

About 1,200 Al Qaeda fighters remain in the rocky fortress cut into the White Mountains, Ali said. Whether Bin Laden is hiding among them remains a disputed point. Either way, their numbers are dwindling--hundreds of suspected terrorists have slipped undetected along the mountain ridges to the rugged border with neighboring Pakistan, Afghan officials said.

“They ran away to the hillsides, where there’s a lot of forest and woods,” Mir said. “They might have crossed into Pakistan.”

‘We Do Not Know Who Is Escaping’

Pace made much the same point at the Pentagon: “We do not know who is escaping and who is not. It is reasonable to expect that some could get out of the mountain complex. There are multiple routes of ingress and egress, so it is certainly conceivable that groups of two, three, 15, 20 could . . . get out.”

The question of whether and how to surrender has split the Al Qaeda fighters into two camps, said Abdullah, an anti-Taliban intelligence officer who, like many Afghans, goes by one name. About 500 hard-line Arab warriors are determined to fight to the death, Ali said. But about 700 non-Arabs--for the most part Chechens, Uzbeks and Pakistanis--were ready to leave the terrorist hide-out and be taken into custody, he said.

The United States has made demands that the Arabs can’t accept, Mir said. He refused to elaborate. “For the Arabs, I don’t think there’s a possibility of surrender,” he added. “They don’t trust us.”

U.S. Special Operations Troops Are in Region

The U.S. role in a possible Al Qaeda surrender is murky. Afghan officials refuse to speak on the record about the presence of Western forces in the mountains, but witnesses reported seeing about 100 U.S. and British special operations troops in the region.

Pace confirmed that U.S. special operations troops are operating in the area, providing advice to opposition forces and identifying targets for American warplanes.

“It’s certainly conceivable that U.S. forces could be in direct combat,” he said. “I’m not aware of that having happened yet in that particular area.”

Early Wednesday, shortly after the Al Qaeda fighters were due to climb down from their hide-out under the terms of the aborted surrender pact, a B-52 dropped the first bomb of a daylong assault. As a massive cloud of gray smoke poured into the sky, soldiers herded onlookers down a rocky trail. “We’re clearing the road,” commander Bandi Gul said. “The Arabs have agreed to come down.”

But as more bombs exploded in the valley, confusion reigned among the Afghans. Commander Haji Zahir came rumbling up the path, his pickup truck packed with soldiers.

“There is no surrender. The cease-fire is over,” he called out the window. “I will order my men to fight.”

Behind Zahir came commander Halim Shah with the opposite message: “The cease-fire continues. They are meeting, they are negotiating. They will come down.”

A day earlier, anti-Taliban forces lined the roads and fired their guns into the sky to celebrate the surrender of Al Qaeda. But on Wednesday, listless soldiers stood around as U.S. jets pounded away at the terrorist fortress.

At sunset, anti-Taliban commander Haji Mohammed Zaman sat glumly in an old military headquarters where the roof has been missing since U.S. bombs blew it off this month. “It’s a very bad day,” he said.

On Tuesday, he had brokered the Al Qaeda surrender. It appeared to be a coup for the fledgling, self-declared local government in Nangarhar province, which had been trying for weeks to coax the enemy fighters from the mountains.

On Wednesday, asked what went wrong, Zaman stared down at the dirt.

“I can’t talk about it,” he finally said.

Stack reported from Tora Bora and Kempster from Washington.