Tuesday, November 20, 2001

$25 million bounty offered on bin Laden
By Robert Burns
Associate Press

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon hopes Afghans motivated by the Taliban's collapse and millions in U.S. reward money will find Osama bin Laden's hideout so U.S. troops won't have to hunt cave-to-cave for him, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday.

The U.S. approach, at least for now, is to continue bombing suspected hide-outs while leaving it to local people to search on the ground, Rumsfeld said. He suggested a $25 million reward — plus extra bounty offered by the CIA — may prompt Afghans to “begin crawling through those tunnels and caves.”

If the job eventually falls to the U.S. military, it will require different kinds of forces than the special operations troops now in Afghanistan, the defense secretary said.

Speaking at a Pentagon news conference on the 44th day of U.S. bombing, Rumsfeld also said the United States would not let Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar escape from Kandahar, his southern stronghold now under siege, even if opposition groups negotiated a deal with him for free passage.

Rumsfeld was asked about reports that Omar is trying to negotiate a handover of power in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban militia that has harbored bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorist network.

“If the thrust of that question is would we knowingly allow him to get out of Kandahar, the answer is, ‘No, we would not,’” he said.

Rumsfeld said U.S. special forces in Afghanistan — now numbering several hundred — had not yet pursued any Taliban or al-Qaida leaders into neighboring Pakistan. “If one of those folk that we particularly wanted was known” to be crossing a border “we might have an early intensive consultation with the neighbors,” he added.

Likewise, in the other major pocket of Taliban and al-Qaida resistance, the northern city of Kunduz, the United States is trying to avoid any dealmaking that would allow enemy forces to escape, he said.