US military forces will do "whatever is necessary" to root out the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists from their cave hideouts, the US Defence Secretary, Mr Don Rumsfeld, said yesterday.
Speaking on NBC's Meet the Press, Mr Rumsfeld acknowledged the difficulty of locating and penetrating cave systems and said the decision has not been made whether US ground forces will be sent on a cave-by-cave manhunt.
Asked whether poison gas would be pumped into the caves, Mr Rumsfeld noted that Northern Alliance forces used flooding to force the surrender of the last Taliban in a prison fortress near Mazar-e-Sharif in the north.
"I guess one will do whatever it is necessary to do," Mr Rumsfeld said. "If people will not surrender then they've made their choice."
He insisted that the main barrier to bringing in peacekeeping forces from other countries was the opposition of Afghan anti-Taliban officials. "We are very anxious to have the right kind of help," he said. It has been difficult to convince the Northern Alliance to allow non-US troops into their areas of control, Mr Rumsfeld said.
There have been conflicting accounts about US bombs hitting villages near Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan late Friday and Saturday.
Villagers said 150 to 250 civilians were killed and dozens of homes were flattened. Afghan provincial officials also said US planes struck the villages, although they put the death toll around 20. A US spokesman in Washington said US planes attacked a nearby military target, but denied any bombs hit the villages.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is seeking further emergency powers to extend the right of security agencies to wiretap. The new powers, which the Department argues are largely technical but which cause concern to some Democratic leaders and civil rights groups, would allow warrants to be issued against targets whose identities or addresses were not yet known.
They would also allow more extensive seizure of business information related to investigations, and for emergency wiretaps to be undertaken ahead of judicial approval, which would have to be given inside three days.
Congressional approval is still likely given the extent to which bipartisanship is still largely intact on issues directly related to the war on terrorism.
Although the Senate Judiciary Committee has been grilling Administration officials on the new special powers, including military tribunals, and will this week confront the Attorney General, the committee's chairman, Democratic Senator Pat Leahy from Vermont, admitted at the weekend that their eventual focus is more likely to be on insisting on congressional oversight than in blocking the measures. Indeed, because many of the measures are the products of presidential fiats, they have little choice.
But bipartisanship has all but disappeared on domestic issues. Republicans will today try and force through votes to introduce a moratorium on human cloning and to open up the Alaskan National Wilderness Reserve to oil exploration.
And a war of words continues over the deadlocked economic stimulus package with Republicans insisting on using the package to provide massive tax cuts to business while Democrats want spending increases to help the unemployed. Democratic strategists believe that they can attack the Administration on the economy without appearing unpatriotic, arguing that while the President may be winning the war he is adrift on the economy and even to blame for the recession. New figures that show the government moving into significant deficit are being used by Democrats to depict the Republican tax cuts to business as fiscally irresponsible, a tactic that worked well against President Bush's father even as he basked in his successful conduct of the Gulf War.
