Pentagon: Pakistani Forces Roust Terrorists

By John Diamond

WASHINGTON — Pakistani military forces have been driving Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters into neighboring Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s top military intelligence officer said Tuesday.

Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said Pakistan’s military has done more fighting in the northwestern region of the country, next to Afghanistan. “Pakistani counterterrorism operations temporarily disrupted local safe havens and forced some Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives into Afghanistan,” Maples told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In another operation today, Pakistani security forces backed by helicopter gunships struck a militant hideout in North Waziristan near the Afghan border, killing or wounding at least 25 militants, said Syed Zaheerul Islam, the top government administrator of the region. The militants had entered the tribal region after a raid inside Afghanistan, Islam said.

Islam told the Associated Press that the men were running a training camp and that the strike triggered explosions in an arms dump at the site. He said troops were searching for casualties.

In a previous operation, U.S. forces in Afghanistan were given the chance to pursue terrorists rousted from Pakistan, Maples said. U.S. troops are on the ground in Afghanistan but not in Pakistan.

Maples didn’t say whether any Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters had been killed or arrested in the operation.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has repeatedly rejected charges that his forces have not done enough to break up terrorist havens in the largely ungoverned regions of western Pakistan. In a visit to Pakistan in February, Afghan President Hamid Karzai urged Musharraf to act against Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan.

The Taliban is the radical Islamic faction that ran Afghanistan at the time of the 9/11 attacks and hosted al-Qaeda, the terror organization that launched the attacks. Maples said the Taliban still dominates attacks in Afghanistan, which increased by 20% last year.

Meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte testified that most of al-Qaeda’s leadership as of 9/11 has been captured or killed. Its leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, remain at large.

(c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.