U.S. to Send More Troops to Search Caves of Tora Bora

New York Times
December 21, 2001
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/21/international/21CND-MILI.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that he had approved the deployment of a substantial number of American troops to search the caves of Tora Bora for die-hard terrorists.

"Whatever is needed will be sent," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "And it won't be just U.S. It will be coalition forces."

Later, President Bush reiterated his commitment to doing whatever it takes to hunt down terrorists, vowing that while Osama bin Laden might "slither out" of Afghanistan he will not escape the worldwide reach of the American military.

The president, in a year-end conversation with several reporters, said the United States is prepared to send troops to other nations seeking help in pursuing terrorists. Mr. Bush repeated a theme he first voice just after the Sept. 11 attacks: other countries must be "for us or against us" in combatting terrorism.

Today, he said his message to world leaders is: "Thank you for your condolences. I appreciate your flowers. Now arrest somebody if they're in your country."

In Afghanistan, British special forces are working with the American military, and scores of American troops are already operating in the Tora Bora cave region. Several military officials have said that the man running the day-to-day operations in Afghanistan, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, has asked for hundreds more.

While Mr. Rumsfeld declined to be specific about numbers, he confirmed the reports of a sharp increase in the number of soldiers and marines who, along with Afghan forces, will be going cave to cave, looking for "information and evidence and people and weapons."

As if to dispel any notion that a lull in aerial bombing signals a quieter, somehow tamer campaign, the secretary said American troops had been instructed that, in some areas of Afghanistan, "they are entitled to assume that anyone in there is an enemy and may be dealt with" accordingly.

The American military's "rules of engagement" in dealing with pockets of Taliban and Al Qaeda resistance "have our forces leaning forward, not back," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

There has been no bombing of Tora Bora for the last two days simply because American and other anti-Taliban forces are already there, hunting through the mazes of caves and tunnels, Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Mr. Rumsfeld said that in a bombing raid on Thursday on a suspected enemy convoy in eastern Afghanistan "a lot of people were killed and a lot of vehicles damaged." The attack was made southwest of Tora Bora, according to Gen. Peter Pace of the Marine Corps, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He said the convoy was believed to be carrying suspected Al Qaeda or Taliban leadership, but he did not specify which group might have been involved.

Within an hour of the Pentagon briefing, an Afghan news agency report said the target was in fact a convoy of Afghan elders, tribal chiefs and commanders from eastern Afghanistan on their way to Kabul to attend the inauguration on Saturday of the interim Afghan government.

But the Pentagon said otherwise. "The intelligence we gathered at the time indicated to us that this was in fact leadership and we struck the leadership," the general said at the late-morning briefing. And well into the afternoon, Pentagon officials said they had learned nothing to contradict their initial intelligence, which labeled the convoy as belonging to the enemy.

The Defense Secretary is typically so circumspect in answering journalists' questions that his remarks today about the important role of American ground troops carried extra weight.

President Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld and General Franks have all repeatedly said that the war on terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks will be long, hard and dirty. Mr. Rumsfeld said the United States had received the strongest possible assurances from officials of the interim Afghan government that they share the goal of ridding the country of terrorists.

Mr. Rumsfeld said information gathered in Afghanistan to date had led to the arrest of suspected terrorists around the world "and undoubtedly" prevented other attacks.

Military officials have acknowledged that the Tora Bora region has even more caves and tunnels than they had expected - "hundreds and hundreds," as Mr. Rumsfeld put it today. Many have been destroyed by American bombing, he said, but many remain.

There were still no new answers on the question about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden.

"We don't know if he's alive or dead," General Pace said.

And Mr. Rumsfeld, while conceding that information on Mr. bin Laden's possible whereabouts had been scarce of late, recited what he said was an axiom within the intelligence community: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."