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CNN Live Sunday

Expect City Fighting and Pressure From U.S. Troops in Kandahar

Aired November 26, 2001 - 22:25   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.
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back. It has been a day of important developments for the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan, and for the Northern Alliance.

Joining us now from Little Rock, Arkansas is former NATO Supreme Commander and CNN Military Analyst, Retired General Wesley Clark. Good evening, General Clark.

It has been, as we just heard from the reporter in Kandahar, intense fighting underway overnight there. We've got Marines landing south of the city. In the meantime, you have the Taliban, presumably al Qaeda, saying they'll never give up this spiritual capitol. What should we expect here?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK (RET.), CNN MILITARY ANALYST: Well, I think we're going to see, obviously, pressure. Whether the Marines actually have to move into the city or not is unclear. There are some Pashtun tribes in the south who are also anti-Taliban. The Marines moving in there is a logical next step to support them. It also gives options for moving elsewhere in southern Afghanistan, so that would help us in the pursuit of al Qaeda.

I think that we'll resist moving into Kandahar if we can get the other Pashtun's to move in there against the Taliban first. But if necessary, and if we think that al Qaeda is in there, then we could move toward the city.

WOODRUFF: Is air support, air power, in a situation like this, enough to soften up the Taliban and al Qaeda enough so that these Pashtun forces can do it on their own?

CLARK: It would be. But whenever you're involved in city fighting, then there's going to be extraordinary care taken to avoid harming innocent civilians, and we know from the experience, for example, in Mogadishu, when the Army Rangers were in there and special operations folks, that a lot of civilians got in the way and participated in that fight and a lot of them got hurt. And I'm sure that our troops will do everything they can to avoid something like that happening in Kandahar.

So, we would expect to have observers with the Pashtun tribes in the south. They'd be directing the air strikes. They'd be working house by house, block by block, right literally in front of the troops on the ground. WOODRUFF: There are some who are going to look at this and say this could be the final battle in Afghanistan. Could it be?

CLARK: Well, it could be, but remember the objective really isn't the Taliban. The objective is really al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden; his headquarters, his command and control and so forth. And so, if it is located in Kandahar and it falls, well and good, but really the whole key right now is to fight to get the information that's needed to smash the al Qaeda network.

WOODRUFF: How do you explain what happened in Mazar-e Sharif, where you had these 400 or some odd hardened Taliban fighters from -- non-Afghans, who somehow got hold of weapons and staged a rebellion?

CLARK: Well, that's hard to explain from here, but obviously there's a lot of side-switching going on and there's a lot of people whose loyalties are mixed, and perhaps someone did smuggle in a weapon. Perhaps they seized them from guards. Don't know.

It's one of the hazards of any military operation, when you have a large number of prisoners coming in, and you don't have them organized and separated, segregated by trained troops. Now, our United States armed forces, our military police, are trained to do this. But there's no one in the Northern Alliance who had any training in this. They put them all in there together. They were trying to interrogate them and sort them out, I'm sure, and it happened. It's the kind of thing that can happen in warfare.

WOODRUFF: But aren't -- in a situation like that, wouldn't people be thoroughly searched?

CLARK: Well, you would think that they'd be thoroughly searched before they were put in there, but we don't know how they got the weapons. They could have taken them from people that were inside guarding them. They could have had them smuggled in. Or they could have been improperly searched coming in.

WOODRUFF: There's some questions being raised, General Clark, about the decision on the part of the Northern Alliance apparently to let the Afghan Taliban surrender and then go free. Is this a wise move, do you believe?

CLARK: Well, I think that it was a trade-off, obviously. They wanted to encourage the surrender in Konduz. They did not want to have to fight for the whole town, and so this is a way of splitting the Afghans from the non-Afghan fighters inside working with the Taliban. And it worked.

So, there was a surrender. Some of the hard-liners have tried to escape. There's been some fighting, probably still going on in Konduz. So, now it will be a question of do they -- do the Northern Alliance follow through with the pledge to allow the Afghan Taliban to go back. My guess would be yes, but not for a while.

WOODRUFF: What do you mean? CLARK: Well, I think it's likely they'll be detained for some days there, until the situation is cleared up around Kandahar. It wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to release them and have them move immediately back into reinforced Mullah Omar if he's defending Kandahar.

WOODRUFF: Step back for just a moment -- if you're running the operation, what are you looking ahead to in the next days, week or so? Overall?

CLARK: Well, it's a little hard to see from the outside, and what you want to do is you want to have options at all times. And so, putting the Marines in there, that's options. Getting more bases, getting more air access into the area, that's options.

But the big thing is to get information. We don't know exactly what information is coming in. Probably we are getting some information as a result of the $25 million reward, and as a result of all of the people who've defected and been captured and are being processed and interrogated as prisoners right now. And we should be following up on every bit of that information.

And then it's a question of validating information, going in there and finding any areas outside of Kandahar where there might be a headquarters, isolating that area so that the people there can't escape, and then working it over at our own pace and with our own methods over a period of days. That's what we'd be looking for as commanders.

WOODRUFF: Having said that, it's still entirely possible, isn't it, that Osama bin Laden and the top al Qaeda people have escaped.

CLARK: Anything's possible in this, but the odds are he hasn't, because there's been so much pressure on him, and there's so much international focus on this, it's going to be very difficult for any government to give him shelter anywhere in the world at this point.

WOODRUFF: All right. Retired General Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Commander. Thank you again, General Clark, we appreciate it.

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