Author: Dexter Filkins
Publication: The New York Times
Date: March 21, 2002
The commander of American forces
here said today that they might cross the border into Pakistan to capture
or kill Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters widely believed to have found sanctuary
there.
In an interview at his headquarters
here, Maj. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck of the 10th Mountain Division said
chasing Al Qaeda and the Taliban into Pakistan would be a "last resort"
carried out with the approval of Pakistani leaders.
Just 20 miles from the border with
Pakistan, near Khost, American troops were attacked from several directions
with mortars, small arms and rocket-propelled grenades for about an hour
on Tuesday night, American military officials said. One soldier received
a bullet wound in the left arm.
"Our forces returned fire, and B-1's
and AC-130 gunships responded," Gen. John W. Rosa Jr., deputy director
of current operations for the Joint Staff, said during a Pentagon news
briefing.
General Hagenbeck said it was not
clear whether the Americans were caught in fighting between Afghan factions
or had come under attack from Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters.
American commanders have said fighting
in Afghanistan may increase as the snows melt in spring. There also have
been growing signs that American military leaders are thinking about broadening
the field of action by moving against Taliban and Al Qaeda sanctuaries
in Pakistan, where the government says it has deployed thousands of troops
to seal the border.
General Hagenbeck suggested that
sealing the border was not the Pakistani government's highest priority.
"I think Pakistan is more focused on tensions with India," he said.
General Hagenbeck declined to give
specifics but said any eventual move into Pakistan would more likely be
planned to thwart movements by the opposing side rather than to stage a
frantic chase across national frontiers.
"Hot pursuit would probably be my
last resort," General Hagenbeck said. "What we would try to do is anticipate
any type of operations that would cause the enemy to go into Pakistan,
and we would try to coordinate with the Pakistan government, and our ambassador
in Pakistan, before we did any of those kinds of operations."
This week, Gen. Tommy R. Franks,
the commander of American forces in the region, asked Pakistan's president,
Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to take part in joint military actions to apprehend
Al Qaeda and Taliban forces moving back and forth across the border, according
to a senior Pakistani government official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
General Musharraf made no decision
on General Franks' request, the senior Pakistani official said.
On Tuesday, George M. Tenet, the
director of central intelligence, in testimony to the Senate Armed Forces
Committee, said he needed "a lot more help" from countries where Al Qaeda
and Taliban fighters may have fled.
"There's still many, many points
of exit that people in small numbers can get out," Mr. Tenet said.
A decision by American forces to
cross the border and strike Al Qaeda sanctuaries is politically explosive
in Pakistan, where General Musharraf's decision to side with America in
its battle against militant Islam is already drawing widespread opposition.
The people living in the Afghan-Pakistani
border region are overwhelmingly members of the Pashtun ethnic group, as
were most of the Taliban.
The Pakistani government has denied
knowingly harboring Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters, although its intelligence
agencies routinely aided the Taliban until General Musharraf decided to
break with the Afghan mullahs after the attacks on the Pentagon and World
Trade Center on Sept. 11.
The rugged, mountainous tribal areas
of northwest Pakistan have long provided a safe haven for guerrillas and
smugglers of all sorts. When the Afghan fighters known as mujahadeen were
battling the decade-long occupation by the Soviet Union, they used the
area as a staging ground for attacks and were rarely chased across the
border by Soviet forces.
Last November, when American officials
believed that they had Osama bin Laden cornered in the mountains of eastern
Afghanistan, a large number of Al Qaeda forces, and possibly Mr. bin Laden
himself, were thought to have slipped into Pakistan.
Recent clashes with American forces
suggest that Taliban and Al Qaeda forces may be using the region as a safe
haven, traveling back and forth across the border to stage strikes against
the Americans and then retreat to safety.
The Shah-i-Kot Valley, the scene
of a big American military operation that was declared over this week,
lies just 45 miles north of the border, and General Hagenbeck said today
that many Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters had entered the area from the area
south of Shah-i-Kot.
Pakistani officials said today that
a group of seven suspected Al Qaeda members arrested on Tuesday might have
been trying to enter Afghanistan from Pakistan. Earlier this week, a team
of American Special Forces killed 16 fighters they suspected were Al Qaeda
members near the Pakistani border who had fled the Shah-i-Kot battlefield.
The porousness of Pakistan's border
and the possibility that Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are hiding out in
Pakistan dominated the discussion between General Franks and General Musharraf,
the senior Pakistani government official said.
Even as the operation in Shah-i-Kot
is said to be winding down, American military leaders have been hinting
at a busy springtime. With the snows melting in the mountains where Al
Qaeda and Taliban fighters, and possibly leaders, are believed to be hiding,
American officials have said they may undertake similar operations there.
Britain announced this week that
it would dispatch 1,700 combat soldiers to take part in action in Afghanistan,
putting British troops in the position of prosecuting war as well as heading
the international security force deployed in Kabul to keep the peace there.
"This is seasonally the campaign season," General Hagenbeck said. "We expect
to see some increased enemy activity."
The general said that for now his
forces were focusing on Paktia Province, which borders Pakistan and was
the site of the Shah-i-Kot operation. He said they were watching that area
"because historically that is where the Al Qaeda and Taliban has either
been supported or accepted, and the local population has been neutral."
Citing Taliban sources, The Associated
Press said today that several senior Taliban leaders were living in Pakistan,
including the former defense minister, Mullah Obeidullah; the former interior
minister, Mullah Abdul Razzak; and a deputy prime minister, Mullah Hasan
Akhund.
In an interview aired Wednesday
on the BBC, Hamid Mir, the editor of Ausaf, a militant Islamic newspaper
in Pakistan, said that 5,000 Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters had massed in
the Pakistani tribal areas, and that large groups had also coalesced near
the Afghan cities of Kandahar, Ghazni and Gardez in Afghanistan.
Mr. Mir said Mullah Razak had told
him just before the Taliban's military collapse in November that the movement
would melt away into the mountains along the Pakistani-Afghan border and
regroup in the spring.