Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signaled on Friday that the United States would seek support from opposition forces in northern Afghanistan, in its campaign to force the ruling Taliban to hand over terror suspect Osama bin Laden.
The northern opposition alliance, a coalition of factions based mainly in a mountainous region north of Kabul, is the only internal force still battling the Taliban, which controls most of Afghanistan.
"One can say, how much help can they be? Well, they can be a lot of help," Rumsfeld said in an interview on Fox television.
"These folks, they know the lay of the land. They know in some cases some targets that are useful. They have some ideas about how to deal with the Taliban," he said. "So I think one has to say that they can be useful in a variety of ways."
President George W. Bush's administration has warned that the Taliban must hand over bin Laden, its top suspect in last week's terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon, or share its fate, amid signs of a looming US strike on Afghanistan.
The opposition, still reeling from the assassination this month of its military chief, Ahmad Shah Masood, has made no secret of its desire for US military help, after years of defeats against the Taliban, which has imposed a radical brand of Islam on the country.
But Rumsfeld did not mention any specific plans to arm the alliance, a loose coalition of warlords from the Uzbek, Hazara and Tajik ethnic minorities.
Russia, Iran and India are believed to have helped the alliance in the past, but its forces have been no match for the Taliban, which has been backed by Pakistan and bolstered by thousands of Arab and Muslim volunteers.
Rumsfeld suggested that the Taliban's grip on power in Afghanistan may be shakier than it appears, likening it to the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and dictatorships in eastern and central Europe.
"It was a surprise that at a certain moment the people there who did not agree with those regimes, felt it was the right moment and stepped forward and acted on their own," he said.
"It was not some country going in and rooting it out. It was the very people in those countries who could no longer tolerate living in those dictatorial regimes," he said.
The northern alliance, which musters only around 15,000 troops, is confined to the Panjshir Valley, northeastern Badakhshan province and pockets of territory in the north and west.
Without the talismanic Masood at its head though, fears have mounted that the alliance could splinter.
Alliance fighters could provide highly valuable experience in the inhospitable and mountainous terrain and conditions US forces would face if they were ever to deploy in Afghanistan.
They may also be able to provide intelligence reports on the operations of bin Laden and his al-Qaida network -- WASHINGTON (AFP)
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