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US steps up bin Laden hunt, Karzai widens support
( 2001-12-26 11:37 ) (7 )

US forces girded for a new push in the hunt for Osama bin Laden on Tuesday as Afghanistan's leader Hamid Karzai pressed on with the task of extending his authority across a nation shattered by war into armed fiefdoms.

US defense officials in Washington said American and allied forces would soon make a fresh thrust into caves and tunnels in the Tora Bora area of eastern Afghanistan after bombing bin Laden's al Qaeda fighters there into submission.

``Operations are imminent,'' one defense official said.

One option is to use ``thermobaric'' bombs to blast the air out of the underground mountain warrens, suffocating anyone holed up inside. The Pentagon said on Friday that it was sending 10 of the experimental bombs to Afghanistan.

Other officials said late last week that about 500 Marines had been put on stand-by in Afghanistan for possible orders to help search the caves, al Qaeda's last major Afghan redoubt, for clues to bin Laden's whereabouts.

The Saudi-born militant, accused of masterminding the September 11 attacks on the United States, has vanished and US officials acknowledge they no longer know whether he is dead or alive or has fled Afghanistan.

Kenton Keith, a spokesman for the US-led coalition conducting the hunt for bin Laden, said in Pakistan that it was ''quite possible'' he had been killed, but the US defense official said the search was still on.

BUILDING CONSENSUS

Karzai, sworn into office on Saturday at the head of a new interim government following the defeat of bin Laden's Taliban protectors, has said US forces may remain in Afghanistan for as long as it takes to find the millionaire fugitive.

He has moved quickly to establish support for his 30-member cabinet, whose challenge lies in building consensus in a country where 23 years of war have fractured a devastated land into a patchwork of areas run by ethnic warlords and tribal barons.

On Tuesday, Karzai was spending the day meeting tribal elders at the presidential palace after appointing ethnic Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum as deputy defense minister.

Dostum, a former general with his own private army, was propelled back into control of the main northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif with the assistance of US air strikes that toppled the Taliban for harboring bin Laden.

His inclusion in the new government, established under a UN-sponsored power sharing deal, fends off a powerful potential foe and marks a first step to establishing a national army for Afghanistan from its tribal and ethnic militias.

Those fighters have been vital allies in the US air campaign that routed the fundamentalist Islamic Taliban and in the ground assault to flush out diehard Taliban and al Qaeda loyalists.

In the southern city of Kandahar, eight wounded Arab al Qaeda fighters armed with guns and grenades remained barricaded in a ward of a local hospital after a failed attempt by US-backed forces loyal to city governor Gul Agha to deal with them.

AIR STRIKES RESUME

Shooting broke out at the hospital a day earlier after one of the group, apparently injured in US bombing raids, was lured into leaving the ward and sounded the alarm when he realized it was a trap. US forces arrested him, witnesses said.

``Now they are very nervous and they won't allow anyone in, not even the nurses,'' said security guard Niaz Mohammad.

Head nurse Ghulam Mohammad told reporters: ``I fear now that the solution to this problem will be with bloodshed.''

Kandahar, the spiritual birthplace of the Taliban and the movement's last bastion, fell to tribal fighters on December 7.

US defense officials said air strikes over Afghanistan had resumed on Sunday with multiple attacks on caves and ammunition dumps north of Kandahar using precision-guided munitions.

The strikes ended a lull following a deadly raid on a convoy in eastern Afghanistan last week that survivors said was a mistaken target.

Villagers in eastern Paktia province and survivors say up to 60 people were killed when US aircraft attacked a motorcade carrying ethnic Pashtun tribal elders to Karzai's inauguration.

US defense officials say they struck a legitimate target -- presumed to be Taliban militia -- after members of the convoy fired shoulder-launched missiles at US planes.

Karzai's spokesman Ustad Stanikzai added his voice to speculation that Afghan foes of some of the elders in the motorcade may deliberately have misidentified them to US forces.

``Rivalries among the various tribes may have led to the incident,'' Stanikzai said.