Rumsfeld: No Thaw In Terrorist Hunt

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Saturday that 12,000 United States and other Western troops were ready to "go after" any al Qaeda and Taliban guerrillas who regroup to launch a spring offensive in Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld, who flew into Afghanistan amid tight security for talks with interim leader Hamid Karzai and other officials, said restoring reasonable security in Afghanistan was an important goal for the U.S.-led coalition.

But he warned U.S. and other Western troops that the coalition needed to finish the job of eliminating terrorism around the world urgently, before extremists got their hands on weapons of mass destruction.

He said the security situation had improved somewhat since he first visited in December, but repeated there would be no U.S. peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan despite pressure from international aid organizations.

On Friday night, a rocket hit a runway near the airport headquarters of the international peacekeeping force in Kabul but failed to explode and caused no damage or casualties, spokesmen for the force said Saturday.

Forces at the airport reported hearing several rockets overhead. Group Capt. Steve Abbott, the British commander of the airfield, said he suspected three were fired but could only confirm one.

The fragile security situation was also underlined by reports of fresh fighting between rival warlords in the eastern city of Gardez.

An Afghan warlord rained hundreds of rockets onto Gardez on Saturday, killing at least 25 people in the biggest outbreak of fighting between rival Afghan forces for several months, the provincial governor said.

Governor Taj Mohammad Wardak of Paktia province, scene of the biggest U.S.-led ground battle of the Afghan war last month, blamed the attack on former governor Padshah Khan Zadran who was ousted from power in February.

Rumsfeld's visit comes a day before celebrations in Kabul to mark the 10th anniversary of the end of Soviet-backed rule in Afghanistan. In preparation for that, military equipment has poured into the capital.

Soon after he arrived at Bagram Air Base, about 30 miles north of Kabul, Rumsfeld addressed some of the 7,000 U.S. and 5,000 other Western troops in Afghanistan, many of them based at Bagram.

"No," he said, when asked if he was concerned about a successful resurgence of the Taliban and the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden.

"There are a lot of people saying now that spring is coming, the Taliban and al Qaeda will reorganize," he told reporters traveling with him from Kyrgyzstan where he met that country's president on a Central Asian trip.

"Well, if they do, we'll go after them," he said.

In the interview, the secretary pledged continued U.S. military support for an international security force of military peacekeepers, but promised no U.S. troops would be sent despite pressure from international aid and human rights groups.

Rumsfeld's party then flew to the capital Kabul, where he met with Karzai. After that, it was on to the western Afghan city of Herat, bordering Iran, as part of his tour of Afghanistan and Central Asian republics.

Rumsfeld was met by Herat Governor Ismail Khan, a close ally of Iran. Herat is about 60 miles from the Iranian border.

The two were expected to discuss U.S. complaints, rejected by Ismail Khan and Iran, that some fleeing Taliban and al Qaeda forces have managed to escape into Iran from Afghanistan.

After Herat, Rumsfeld heads later on Saturday to the Turkmenistan capital of Ashqabad.

Meanwhile, U.S. forces reportedly joined Pakistani paramilitary troops in searching an Islamic school near the Afghan border for adherents of the al Qaeda network, tribal elders and Muslim clerics said Saturday.

Both U.S. and Pakistani officials have recently said that a small U.S. force is operating in the wild tribal region, but the comments were the first reliable reports of American troops by people in the area.

"The Pakistani forces with the help of American soldiers on Friday stormed a religious school at Darpa Khel to search for al Qaeda men," said Maulvi Abdul Hafeez, a prominent cleric in Mir Ali, about 200 miles southwest of Peshawar. "We condemn this Pakistan-U.S. operation."

The building was empty and no arrests were made, Hafeez said. The school was set up by prominent Taliban leader Jalaluddin Haqqani during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, he added.

Afghan Islamic Press, a private news agency based in Pakistan, reported that about ten U.S. soldiers and 200 Pakistani paramilitary troops attacked Haqqani's school at Darpa Khel on Friday evening.

At MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., Commander Frank Merriman, a spokesman at the Central Command headquarters of Gen. Tommy Franks, said "We really can't confirm ongoing operations.

The Bush administration sees the entry of U.S. personnel into the tribal regions as the beginning of a dangerous but necessary phase in the hunt for al Qaeda fighters who have taken refuge outside Afghanistan.

Tribal areas lie west of the capital, Islamabad, just inside the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan's Paktia and Paktika provinces. They are traditional strongholds for bin Laden.

U.S. officials say Haqqani, the Taliban's former minister of frontier affairs, has been supporting efforts by al Qaeda and Taliban fighters intent on regrouping.

Before the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, Haqqani ruled much of Paktia province and consented to bin Laden's construction of training camps there.

Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has defied strong anti-American sentiment among Pakistanis and supported Bush in the anti-terrorism campaign. The presence of U.S. ground forces chasing al Qaeda inside Pakistan adds new fuel to opponents of Musharraf.

The Pakistani army treads lightly in the tribal regions and has been unable to police its border alone.

Hafeez said the tribal elders and religious leaders were appealing to the Pakistani government to refrain from conducting more operations, asserting that neither al Qaeda nor Taliban members are hiding there.

"In order to prevent these kind of raids in future we have started consulting other tribal elders and clerics. We will not let American forces operate in our areas," Hafeez told The Associated Press by phone on Saturday.