Bin Laden’s al Qaeda control questioned

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The top American commander in Afghanistan said yesterday he has no evidence that Osama bin Laden is in day-to-day control of al Qaeda but suggested that the long-absent terrorist leader is alive.

Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, speaking to reporters during a visit to the Pentagon, talked mostly about a lack of evidence about bin Laden’s whereabouts, health and current role in the al Qaeda network. He remains a critical target, however, Gen. Barno said.

Still, “I don’t see any indications that he is in day-to-day command and control, as it were, of the al Qaeda organization or the other terrorist groups that work with him, certainly in the Afghanistan-Pakistan area,” Gen. Barno said.

Gen. Barno suggested that bin Laden’s death would be difficult to conceal from intelligence services, even if he died in a secret place, because his associates would talk about it. Recent communications from al Qaeda’s top echelon have come from bin Laden’s chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, as videotaped messages.

Early this year, Gen. Barno and his staff predicted that bin Laden would be captured by the end of the year. No longer.

“I retired my crystal ball, and I don’t make predictions anymore in terms of when we’re potentially going to get any of the figures out there that we pursue every day in Afghanistan,” he said.

Gen. Barno called the Oct. 9 presidential election a success, and told stories of Afghans waiting in the snow for hours to vote. Some stayed in line even as insurgent rockets landed 200 yards away.

Another visitor to Washington, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, speaking to reporters at the State Department, characterized the elections as “a spectacular success” unprecedented in the South Asian country’s 5,000-year history.

“The people of Afghanistan want their country to succeed,” said Mr. Khalilzad, who was born in the South Asian country. “They want us to help them.”

To do that, he said, the threat from Afghanistan’s former extremist Taliban rulers must be ended, and the country’s massive cultivation of opium, which accounts for half of Afghanistan’s economy, must be stopped.

Security forces must be built up under a strategic partnership between the United States and Afghanistan, he said.

“We have seen that the failure of Afghanistan causes problems that can have enormous effect on the security of the American people. We saw that September 11,” Mr. Khalilzad said. The airplane hijackers who attacked the United States on that day in 2001 were trained at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.

Gen. Barno said Afghan- istan’s major security problems include stemming the narcotics trade and trying to persuade former rank-and-file Taliban militiamen to join society.

U.N. surveys estimate that Afghanistan’s illegal poppy cultivation accounted for three-quarters of the world’s opium last year and earned $2.3 billion.

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