Sunday, October 21 9:41 PM SGT
Bin Laden is a step ahead of foes, says opposition commander
GULBOHAR, Afghanistan, Oct 21 (AFP) -
The United States will need more than air strikes and commandos to find Osama bin Laden, a senior Afghan opposition figure who has dealt with the accused terrorist said Sunday.

"He never sleeps. He moves around all the time. Even if we recapture eastern Afghanistan, he can move into the forests and the mountains," Haji Abdul Qadir, a former governor of the eastern province of Nangahar told AFP.

"He does not have a small organisation. Where he is now -- only God knows."

Bin Laden's ability to hide is now legendary, but Qadir is one of the few Afghan opposition figures who has had close contacts with the world's most wanted man, now a "guest" of the dominant Taliban militia.

Qadir fought alongside bin Laden and his Arab army in the later stages of the war against the 1980-89 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

He said the Arab volunteers in the anti-Soviet Jihad (Holy War) were uncooperative and too extreme.

"There were serious differences between me and the Arabs. They accused me of being too westernised," recounted Qadir, a neatly-groomed and well spoken ethnic Pashtun.

He also linked Arab extremists to the 1993 murder of three UN workers near the eastern city of Jalalabad, but insisted he was powerless to confront the armed radicals.

When bin Laden returned to Afghanistan from Sudan in June 1996, he flew into Nangahar province, where Qadir was the governor.

However Qadir insists he was the reluctant host to an uninvited guest. He also points to the fact that months after bin Laden arrived, the Taliban rolled in and he was ousted.

Qadir is now based in Gulbohar at the mouth of the Panjshir Valley opposition stronghold, and one of the few ethnic Pashtun members of the anti-Taliban alliance.

But on how bin Laden came back to Afghanistan in 1996, he also points the finger at his current allies.

"On how Osama came in, for that you'd better ask (ousted president Burhanuddin) Rabbani. Osama flew in on a government plane, an Ariana Airlines plane, with a valid passport and visa. I only found out a few days after he arrived," Qadir said.

"He then moved up to the mountains near Jalalabad. But we had tried and failed before to get the Arabs out.

"What could I do? We never knew what he was doing, because we had too many problems of our own. Hundreds dead every day, houses burned," he said.

He also claimed he had offered to cooperate with the United States to snatch bin Laden in 1996 -- before the 1998 embassy bombings in east Africa and last month's attacks on New York and Washington which the US blames on bin Laden.

"I said to the American counsel in Peshawar (Pakistan) that Osama is here. 'If you want him, come and get him', I said. But he did not take it seriously," Qadir said. "The Americans just laughed at us."

"Osama had engineers and chemists coming from Egypt and other Arab countries, he had workshops in Jalalabad. We (the Jalalabad authorities) thought he was only against us, not the whole world."

Qadir is sceptical about the current US offensive against the Taliban and bin Laden. He said that unless Washington pumped in aid to the anti-Taliban alliance, they could find themselves in a war they cannot win.

"So far the Americans have not asked what the Afghan people want. They are just bombing. But this is very difficult for them alone to get rid of terrorism. Bombing will kill civilians, and if they send in troops, I am afraid they will experience the same as the Russians.

"That is why America needs to help us," Qadir said