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Al-Qaeda significantly weakened
Terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden may have escaped capture for years, but he's on the run with his al-Qaeda group "significantly weakened", American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday.Speaking on ABC television, Rice defended the US effort to nab Bin Laden that has drawn fire from Democratic critics, including a potential presidential candidate, Senator Hillary Clinton. "Yes, we are dealing with a figure who has been able to hide, but he's on the run," Rice said. "His organisation has been significantly weakened because of the international effort against al-Qaeda in places like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia." The top US diplomat also took an implicit jab at the previous administration of Bill Clinton for failing to deal with Bin Laden before he launched the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon. She said Bin Laden "is not the figure who sat for the entire period of the 1990s in Afghanistan, with training camps there, able to carry out operations, able to use the territory of Afghanistan as a base for his operations". "We now have an ally in Afghanistan that is fighting against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda," Rice said. "We now have allies in Pakistan, who are fighting against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. "It's a very different situation than we faced in the '90s." Rice was responding to a video clip of Hillary Clinton shown by ABC in which the New York senator told a crowd: "You cannot explain to me why we have not captured or killed the tallest man in Afghanistan." Posted by: Dan Darling 2006-02-13 |
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