Warships Will Join Manhunt for Bin Laden

As a tough-talking President Bush exhorted U.S. troops at home, the Navy on Wednesday launched plans to begin searching merchant ships in the Arabian Sea that could be smuggling Osama bin Laden or members of his terrorist network out of Afghanistan.

The Pentagon, widening its effort to capture anti-American militants before they flee, said the Navy will board ships if intelligence reports or other clues suggest they may be carrying fugitive fighters. Military officials said they will use some of the dozens of Navy ships that are already operating in the region and will work with officials of Pakistan and other neighboring countries in the effort.

The expansion of the manhunt from underground tunnels to the open seas underscored the urgency the U.S. attaches to preventing the suspected terrorists from escaping to other countries, where they could resume their avowed war on the non-Muslim world. But the president, rallying troops at Ft. Campbell, Ky., reiterated Wednesday that the U.S. anti-terrorist campaign will extend beyond Afghanistan.

“Wars are won by taking the fight to the enemy. America is not waiting for terrorists to try to strike us again. Wherever they hide, wherever they plot, we will strike the terrorists,” the president said, brimming with resolve as 12,000 special operations soldiers, clad in camouflage fatigues and sporting berets, and their families cheered him on.

As Bush spoke, U.S. warplanes again pounded the encircled Taliban strongholds of Kunduz in the north and Kandahar in the south. Taliban and opposition leaders in those two cities continued negotiations to end a bloody battle, but evidently without immediate results.

Near Kunduz, leaders of the Northern Alliance and Taliban officials discussed the terms of surrender.

U.S. Special Forces troops, meantime, have set up roadblocks to intercept Taliban leaders and members of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network; the military has flown in Joint STARS surveillance planes, which can keep track of dozens of moving vehicles. And in recent days, U.S. warplanes have destroyed several aircraft in Afghanistan to prevent their use for an escape.

Even so, officials have continued to worry that Bin Laden or his lieutenants might slip undetected across the huge Afghan border in low-flying airplanes, helicopters or even on horseback.

“They keep cutting and bobbing and dodging and weaving,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters en route to North Carolina to meet with Special Forces personnel. “But we keep looking.”

Determined to keep Al Qaeda fighters from escaping, he said: “Any idea that those people should be let loose on any basis at all to leave that country and go bring terror to other countries and destabilize other countries is unacceptable.”

Rumsfeld also indicated a personal preference that Bin Laden be killed rather than taken alive.

“The president’s policy is dead or alive--and you know I have my preference,” he said, smiling.

In Kunduz, where thousands of foreign Taliban fighters have reportedly holed up, the opposition Northern Alliance said the Taliban was setting only one condition for surrender: their lives. A half-hearted cease-fire is set to expire at an unspecified time today, and its expiration will be swiftly followed by an attack, Northern Alliance commanders said.

Cease-Fire Assertions

Northern Alliance commanders said the cease-fire was in effect to permit civilians to flee the half of Kunduz province that has become a Taliban enclave.

Nonetheless, alliance tanks and artillery fired into Taliban territory periodically, punctuated by U.S. airstrikes.

“If they do not surrender, we will start our attack tomorrow or the day after tomorrow,” said Nazeed Mohammed, commander of the front outside the regional city of Taloqan. “Their time is finished.”

Northern Alliance officials said they have about 30,000 troops arrayed in four fronts around Kunduz who are prepared to move on the encircled region as soon as they get their orders. They said the Taliban has about the same number of fighters holed up in and around Kunduz. Neither estimate could be verified.

The Northern Alliance has fomented discord among the Taliban by separating Afghan Taliban from foreign Taliban--Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens and others who came to Afghanistan to fight. The alliance has suggested that thousands of local Taliban have defected in recent days, eroding support for the foreign hard-liners.

In Washington, a senior U.S. intelligence official said that for now, Washington doesn’t believe the entire Taliban garrison at Kunduz is likely to surrender.

“We think if there’s a surrender, it’s most likely to be a surrender of the Afghan Taliban types, and not the foreign Taliban or Al Qaeda,” the official said. “So if they surrender, it won’t be all of them.”

The official described the situation in Kunduz as still “very fluid.” But he said reports that a mass surrender is being planned should be viewed with caution. “We take it with a grain of salt.”

At the Pentagon, officials said the Navy’s new interdiction effort will be carried out in international waters, under the authority of international laws that entitle countries to make such moves in self-defense, officials said.

Although Afghanistan is landlocked, Taliban forces have reportedly been fleeing to neighboring Pakistan, which is on the Arabian Sea.

Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon that the Navy had not yet stopped any ships; nor did the Pentagon have specific information to suggest that Al Qaeda officials were seeking to escape by sea.

Defense officials noted that Navy ships have been patrolling the region for 10 years, trying to halt the smuggling of Iraqi oil out of the Persian Gulf region.

Even so, finding the militants in such an effort could be a difficult task.

The waters of the north Arabian Sea are busy, and Pakistan has a thinly populated coastline. The busiest port city, Karachi, is home to political groups sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon signaled that it continues to send in more hardware to pursue the Taliban and wants to send other equipment closer to the battlefield.

Officials said that in the last two days, they have begun to use the Global Hawk, an experimental high-altitude surveillance drone that gathers information on enemy movements. The craft, built by Northrop Grumman, is valuable in part because of its ability to remain aloft longer than other drones.

Rumsfeld made it clear that the Pentagon would like to bring AC-130 gunships into neighboring Uzbekistan for possible use against Taliban forces in Kunduz. The gunships are devastatingly effective in destroying ground targets during assaults.

Rumsfeld said that U.S. officials have discussed basing privileges for the AC-130s with officials in Uzbekistan, which is north of Afghanistan.

“Clearly, the range of an AC-130 is such that it’s helpful to have access to all portions of Afghanistan--particularly when you have a situation like Kunduz, because that particular weapons system can put an enormous amount of ordnance, with a great deal of precision, without a lot of collateral damage,” Rumsfeld said.

In London on Wednesday, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw dismissed persistent reports in the British media of divisions between London and Washington over the deployment of troops to Afghanistan.

Straw said the two governments are not at odds over political, military or humanitarian goals.

“I have seen no evidence of divergence in priorities between ourselves and the United States. They are as committed as we are to the three-pronged strategy: military action, the political process and humanitarian support. And all of us have said we are in there for the long term,” Straw said.

Deployment Delayed

The British government put 6,000 troops, including paratroopers and Royal Marine commandos, on short notice to go to Afghanistan last week but has not deployed them.

British newspapers have suggested that this is because the United States is more interested in routing the Taliban and in hunting down Bin Laden than in stabilizing the military situation on the ground and helping with nation-building.

British officials say the bigger problem is defining a role for the troops and ensuring their security. The Northern Alliance has sent mixed messages as to how welcome U.S. and British forces are.

The opposition force appears to be saying that a small deployment for specific tasks would be welcomed, but not a large-scale military presence.

At a news conference at 10 Downing Street before leaving for a two-day trip to Iran and Pakistan, Straw said he wouldn’t comment on troop deployments. He said only that Britain would consult with the Northern Alliance before making any large-scale deployments inside Afghanistan.

In southern Afghanistan, Taliban officials vowed never to retreat from their spiritual capital, Kandahar.

In a news conference for foreign journalists in Spin Buldak, near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, Taib Agha, a spokesman for Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, called reports of surrender negotiations “propaganda.”

But many other sources confirmed that negotiations were continuing, and noted that their success largely hinges on what happens in Kunduz, according to Taliban sources in southern Afghanistan. The defeat or surrender of the movement’s forces in Kunduz would seriously weaken the hard-liners within the Taliban ranks who are said to be hanging onto the hope of a counteroffensive.

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Richter reported from Washington and Reynolds from Chogha, Afghanistan. Times staff writers Edwin Chen in Ft. Campbell; John Hendren at Ft. Bragg, N.C.; Alissa J. Rubin and Tyler Marshall in Spin Buldak, Afghanistan; Bob Drogin in Washington; and Marjorie Miller in London contributed to this report.