01/16/2002
EDITORIAL NUMBER=0-09648

INTELLIGENCE GATHERING

The oppressive Taleban regime has been driven from power in Afghanistan. But a number of senior Taleban and their al-Qaida terrorist allies are still at large. They will be found and they will be brought to justice.

The American-led coalition continues to conduct intelligence-gathering operations in Afghanistan -- searching tunnels, caves, bunkers, houses and camps. The search is paying off. As U-S Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, the coalition has "obtained a great deal of material, literally hundreds of weapons and ordinance...plus an enormous number of documents and videotapes and computer discs and hard drive and laptops and portable phones and address books." Much of this material was abandoned in great haste. "And all of it," said Mr. Rumsfeld, "is helping us to put together a multidimensional puzzle, and the more pieces we get, the more it begins to reveal a story of the al-Qaida terrorist network, its capabilities, its reach, and other networks with which it collaborates."

Even more intelligence is coming from interviews with the more than four hundred Taleban and al-Qaida now in American custody. Captured terrorists have told coalition officials that at least two senior Taleban were killed during bombing raids in December.

The intelligence gathered in Afghanistan has already helped to foil terrorist attacks elsewhere. Authorities in Singapore have arrested a fifteen-member al-Qaida cell that was planning attacks on U.S. Navy ships. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said that the government there "has acted with dispatch." There have been arrests of terrorists in other countries as well.

America is committed to finding both al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and Taleban head Mullah Mohammad Omar. But an equally important goal, as Secretary Rumsfeld said, is "to stop terrorist networks from being able to continue to threaten the United States, or friends and allies." The campaign will go on until the terrorist leaders are caught and the networks they control are put out of business, once and for all.