Bush Warns Taliban to Surrender Bin Laden or Face Years of Attacks

President Bush gave the Taliban regime in Afghanistan a new chance Thursday to turn over Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants and bring an end to the war there. But barring such surrender, he said, the campaign could last two years.

The president also said for the first time that, after the fighting ends, he saw a longer-term “nation-building” role for the United States, along with the United Nations, in stabilizing war-ravaged Afghanistan.

And, hours after the FBI warned of an imminent threat against the United States from terrorists, and put counter-terrorism forces on heightened status, Bush said the “blanket alert” was issued “in recognition of a general threat we received,” rather than as a warning that a specific city or site had been targeted.

The president’s remarks, in a nationally televised news conference Thursday night, came at the end of the fifth day of an air war directed at terrorist forces in Afghanistan.

“We have ruined terrorist training camps, disrupted their communications, weakened the Taliban military and destroyed most of their air defenses,” Bush said.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said earlier that warplanes had dropped precision-guided 5,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs and earth-penetrating munitions. Marine Maj. Gen. Henry Osman, an official of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the bombs were aimed at caves, tunnels and other underground targets--the types of places in which Bin Laden and leaders of his Al Qaeda terrorist network are believed to hide. Initial attacks since Sunday softened air defenses, Pentagon officials said.

Speaking at his first White House news conference since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and the first prime-time news conference of his presidency, Bush first referred to the wealthy exiled Saudi--believed by U.S. officials to be the mastermind behind nearly a decade of attacks on the United States and U.S. interests overseas--as “Mr. Bin Laden.” But eventually he used a biblical construction for Satan, referring to him as “the evil one.”

The president also held out a carrot and stick for the Taliban rulers with whom Bin Laden is allied:

“My focus is bringing Al Qaeda to justice and saying to the host government, ‘You had your chance to deliver.’ Actually, I will say it again: If you cough him up and his people today, that we’ll reconsider what we’re doing to your country. You still have a second chance. Just bring him in. And bring his leaders and lieutenants and other thugs and criminals with him.”

But if they do not “turn over the parasites that hide in their country,” Bush said, he was prepared to continue to wage war.

“This particular battle front will last as long as it takes to bring Al Qaeda to justice,” he said. “It may happen tomorrow, it may happen a month from now, it may take a year or two. But we will prevail.

“What the American people need to know is what our allies know: I am determined to stay the course. And we must do so. We must do so. We must rid the world of terrorists so our children and grandchildren can grow up in freedom.”

Speaking with reporters in the formal setting of the East Room, the president appeared relaxed, taking questions from a dozen reporters in 43 minutes. He ended the session with a plea that American children contribute $1 each to help feed children in Afghanistan, sending the money to the White House.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Bush was hostile to what he derided as U.S. efforts at “nation-building” in the Balkans, criticizing a U.S. role in reconstructing governments there. On Thursday, however, he held out the possibility that the United States would step into a postwar Afghanistan, riven for centuries by tribal and other rivalries.

Bush warned that “we shouldn’t play favorites between one group or another” there, and said the United Nations could provide a framework for stability.

“It would be a useful function for the United Nations to take over the so-called nation-building--I would call it the stabilization of a future government--after our military mission is complete. We’ll participate.”

The president also used the news conference Thursday--held one month to the day after hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field--to deliver a status report on the efforts that have placed his White House on a war footing and have riveted the nation’s attention.

Acknowledging the waves of anxiety and patriotism that have swept the nation’s cities and hamlets since the horrors of Sept. 11, Bush told Americans that “while the threat is ongoing, we’re taking every possible step to protect our country from danger.”

“All is strong and united on the diplomatic front. We are aggressively pursuing the agents of terrors around the world.”

And on the military front, Bush said, “all missions are being executed according to plan.”

Pentagon officials predict their operations long will be focused on patrolling Afghan skies and hitting Taliban and Al Qaeda forces as they emerge from underground bunkers.

“We will play to our strengths. And our strength is endurance,” one defense official said. “We can stay there forever.”

Addressing the risk of entering what one questioner called “a Vietnam-like quagmire,” Bush said the war on which the nation has embarked was being fought on many fronts.

“The ‘greatest generation’ was used to storming beachheads,” he said. “Baby boomers such as myself were used to getting caught in [the] quagmire of Vietnam, where politics made decisions more than the military sometimes. Generation X was able to watch technology right in front of their TV screens, you know, burrow into concrete bunkers in Iraq and blow them up. This is a different kind of war.”

And it is one that depends not on capturing Bin Laden--indeed, Bush said he did not know whether the suspected terrorist leader was dead or alive--but on “routing out terrorism where it may exist all around the world.”

“Slowly but surely, we’re smoking Al Qaeda out of their caves so we can bring them to justice,” Bush said. To date, however, there are no reports that any have been pulled from their redoubts in Afghanistan.

The war has been a demonstration of an almost Orwellian world of shifting alliances, and Bush went out of his way to bestow a verbal pat on the back of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, and to say that Syria, long suspected of supporting terrorists’ actions, had talked to U.S. officials about helping “in the war against terrorism.”

Asked how he could explain his efforts to assure Americans that the country is safe--even as Vice President Dick Cheney spends most of his time away from the White House at what is being called a “secure location”--the president said the distance he was putting between himself and the vice president reflected their responsibility to protect “the continuity of government.”

But, he said, “I shook hands with the vice president today in the Oval Office, welcomed him out of his secure location. . . . He’s looking swell.”

Bush used the conflict as one more reason to abandon the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty because that pact demonstrated what he said was a risk that “a terrorist thug” or a nation might use a rocket to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction, and a national missile defense program might provide protection.

Russia has argued against violating or dropping the treaty to determine whether such a defense shield can be built.

Bush said that the last month has drawn a sense of community out of the nation, and he singled out Christian and Jewish women who, learning that “Muslim women, women of cover, were afraid of going out of their homes alone,” went shopping with them.

He said Americans should look after each other--and keep alert for signs of danger.

But, he said, they should not “use this as an opportunity to pick on somebody that doesn’t look like you or doesn’t share your religion.”

And, he said he was “amazed” at the vitriol directed at the United States--”that people would hate us. Like most Americans, I just can’t believe it, because I know how good we are.”

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Times staff writer Esther Schrader contributed to this report.