Arms Found, Taliban Commander Not
A weekend raid on an Afghan compound apparently failed to snare a senior Taliban commander for whom U.S. troops were looking, defense officials said Tuesday.
Interrogators are still trying to figure out who they did get in an operation Sunday in which five people were killed and 32 captured in a compound north of the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, said Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"It's possible that the leader we were looking for is among the dead, it's possible he is among the detained, it's possible that he wasn't there or that he slipped away," he told a Pentagon news conference.
He declined to name the target of the raid by U.S. special forces or describe the compound or intelligence that led troops there.
The compound where the raid occurred appeared to be an old home of elusive Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.
Other defense officials said on condition of anonymity that an initial evaluation seems to indicate that no high leaders are among those detained, two Pentagon officials said Tuesday on condition of anonymity.
Two huge al Qaeda and Taliban arms caches were found this past weekend in Afghanistan, including five T-54 tanks and more than 15,000 mortar rounds, 800,000 50-caliber machine gun bullets and 600 rocket-propelled grenades.
Were the caches found near Herat in northwestern Afghanistan and Orgun in the eastern mountains the biggest found in the seven-month-old Afghan war?
"If they are not, they are close," Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon.
Pace said the weapons would either be destroyed in place or turned over to the new Afghan army for use in training.
In other developments:
Karzai told a news conference he was "very happy" with the force's performance in Kabul and was confident its mandate would be extended beyond June, when a grand council, or loya jirga, will select a transitional government. "They are staying in Kabul and the time will be extended," he said.
"Indeed, the people of Afghanistan have asked that the (international) forces be deployed around the provinces," Karzai said. "But for the international community it's difficult."
World leaders have repeatedly rebuffed Karzai's calls for the deployment of international peacekeepers outside Kabul, where rivalries among regional warlords threaten Afghanistan's stability as it emerges from decades of war.