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American Morning

Gen. Wesley Clark's Analysis of Current Afghanistan Situation

Aired November 28, 2001 - 09:18   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Ever since the U.S. announced that Osama bin Laden was the man who directed the deadly September 11 terrorist attacks, his supporters have claimed, if you get him, others will take his place. Well it turns out that may literally be true. There are reports that bin Laden has recruited at least 10 body doubles and trained them as decoys. The question is if bin Laden has body doubles, how does the U.S. find the real Osama?

Joining us now from Little Rock, Arkansas to talk about that and other war developments is CNN military analyst General Wesley Clark.

Good morning, how you doing this morning, sir?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Just fine, Paula, good to see you.

ZAHN: Let's start off by talking about this body double scenario. Are there really that many 6-foot-3 inch men that --...

CLARK: I'd be surprised...

ZAHN: ... in Afghanistan right now?

CLARK: ... if he's got that many. I'd be very surprised if he's got that many, but the use of body doubles is something that's frequently discussed and it is used by some foreign leaders. We know that. But this is a case of you're not only going by what he looks like but you're going by all of the other indicators about where he will be.

And so we'll be sifting through all kinds of intelligence. We'll be looking at the size of the party. We'll be getting intercepts of communications reports. We'll be doing all other kinds of things to pinpoint his location. And if we take out a body double first and then take out Osama bin Laden, well that's the misfortune of the body double.

ZAHN: From what I understand though, Osama bin Laden travels around with a pretty large entourage. Doesn't he take a bunch of wives and children with him? It seems to me...

CLARK: Well that's what we've heard.

ZAHN: ... that it would be hard to create the same kind of scenario for a body double.

CLARK: That's right. But on the other hand, I have to treat some of those reports with skepticism. I mean he's going to do whatever he has to do to survive. If it means traveling alone at night on a horse, he might be doing that. If it means traveling with 2,000 people, as some of the reports suggest, he may be doing that. And I'm confident that our intelligence community and our military leaders are perfectly capable of sifting through all of these conflicting reports and tracking him down. It may happen tomorrow, it may happen next week, it may take a month, it may take six months, but he's going to be the continued focus of attention. And it doesn't matter, really, how many body doubles he's using, we're going to track this man down.

ZAHN: Let's bring everybody up to date on the situation with Mullah Omar. U.S. warplanes struck two buildings that U.S. intelligence is telling us housed the Taliban leader. What are your sources telling you, do they think he's dead?

CLARK: No, he's probably not dead. But I think what's important here is that the administration has reported that it has struck this building, that it did know that it held high leadership. And I think it indicates a growing confidence by the Pentagon and the U.S. leadership that they do have up-to-the-minute intelligence and they're willing to share those reports with the American people and the world.

ZAHN: We want to share some maps with our audience now and maybe you can help us better understand the specifics of the search for Osama bin Laden. As we've been reporting, the search is taking place in two key regions, in and around Jalalabad and a town called Tora Bora and an area around Kandahar.

CLARK: Well, reportedly the area around Tora Bora, which is on the route in from the Khyber Pass toward Kabul, has been fortified for some 20 years and it's got -- it's got a massive -- several massive underground complexes with their own utility system. They're at very high altitude, they're protected by a series of outposts and probably mine fields and maybe chemical weapons and other things and numerous fighters. And so it may be difficult for local people to penetrate this.

But clearly the United States is going to rely first on local people, the Northern Alliance and the tribes who comprise it to go in, circle -- encircle, isolate and shrink the defensive perimeter of this fortress. And then bit by bit once it's isolated and encircled, we're going to chip away at it and figure out exactly how to do it -- how to deal with it as we get more information.

Now Kandahar is a different problem because here if he's -- this is a built up area. And we've had some experience in Mogadishu and Somalia with the difficulties of going into built up areas when they're not controlled by forces friendly to us. And so the key in the south is the work done by the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. special forces on the ground to build up the southern tribes to create as much of an analog as the situation in the north is possible so we've got friendly local people on the ground who are working with us, putting the pressure on the Taliban, giving us the information and actually moving into the city. And I'm confident that that's in the process of happening.

ZAHN: And the Secretary of Defense brought up yet another challenge yesterday when he talked about the increasing sense of lawlessness in Afghanistan and he talked about the challenge that U.S. troops, the Marines I guess he was referring to, and the special ops might face in town-to-town fights.

CLARK: This is a real problem.

ZAHN: How concerned are you that American casualties will be taken?

CLARK: Well I think that it's inevitable in operations like this, just as we've seen, there have been casualties already. Fortunately, as far as we know, there have been no fatalities, but casualties are going to occur in something like this.

The lawlessness is a problem. We saw this when we went into the Kosovo situation after the air strikes ended. People are angry, people are scrambling for what they can get, people are -- they feel liberated, they want to take advantage of the situation. It's -- it puts a lot more emphasis on the tribes and the leaderships, the factions that are meeting in Bonn today and during the week, to come to an agreement that will quickly install local authorities, figure out who has the authority to carry weapons and what legal system is going to be used to impose restrictions on people on the ground. This is a situation which, as we've learned through our sorrow over the last decade, we can't afford to neglect.

ZAHN: Well thank you so much for covering so much territory for us this morning and in such a depth as always. General Clark, great to have you aboard.

CLARK: Thank you, Paula.

ZAHN: Thank you.

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