SIR TIM GARDEN:                     After the drama of the 
great breakout by the Northern Alliance, the last seven days have been 
more a time of consolidation, negotiation and localised fighting.  The 
Taliban's northern stronghold of Konduz has been under siege all week. 
Northern Alliance forces which are shown here in yellow have surrounded 
it on all sides, and the Americans have been continuing air strikes to 
cover the defences. An ultimatum to those in the city started negotiations 
in the middle of the week. The sticking point for a surrender was whether 
the foreign fighters in the town could have safe passage out of the country 
and into Pakistan. 

                        Disputes between Northern 
Alliance forces General Dostum's Uzbek forces  pressing from the West, 
and the Tajik forces of the Northern Alliance pressing from the East have 
increased the confusion. There's no doubt that Konduz will fall, in fact 
very soon, it may even have fallen this morning.  The hope is now whether 
a massacre will be prevented. The front line today leaves the Taliban with 
about three or four provinces in the south and with their forces concentrated, 
we've shown those in green,  in Kandahar. 

                        US bombing has continued, 
but the weather has been a bit of a problem on occasions for laser guided 
attacks, which in one case were directed by US troops on horseback. A case 
of the cavalry coming to the rescue. Nor is the rest of the country entirely 
safe from Taliban forces. Fierce fighting continued in some areas north 
of the front line, including Maidan Shahr, where we had Northern Alliance 
forces, elements of Taliban forces, and local warlords getting mixed up 
together.

                        Another danger area is 
the road from Kabul to Jalalabad, where four journalists were murdered 
this week, allegedly by Taliban fighters, when their convoy was stopped 
around here. There are also worries that the Hazara forces (from the central 
part of the country) and now on the outskirts of Kabul are looking for 
a bit of the capital to call their own.

                        There are now secure airfields 
at Mazar up in the north, where the French are expected to establish a 
presence perhaps followed by the Jordanians and they'll set up a hospital, 
and there's the airfield north of Kabul at Bagram, where the one hundred 
British special forces are securing the airfield. After a week of rather 
mixed signals, it now looks as though the six thousand or so British troops 
on standby back in the UK are unlikely to be deployed in the next few days.

JOHN HUMPHRYS:                Air Marshal, given that 
there aren't any coalition forces on the ground.  What's to stop Konduz 
ending in a massacre?

GARDEN:                    Well I think there are 
various factors now. One is that they want Kandahar to fall, and of course 
if they kill all the foreign fighters then that will encourage the foreign 
fighters in Kandahar to try and stay till a last ditch effort. The other 
thing is that there's this conference just outside Bonn in Germany on Tuesday 
and the Northern Alliance are going to want to look respectable at that, 
so I think that's another encouragement for them to treat the foreign fighters 
as prisoners of war.

HUMPHRYS:                    Why does there seem to 
be (perhaps we are wrong about this) but so little progress in sorting 
out the Taliban down in Kandahar?
   
GARDEN:                    I think it's a very different 
situation down there, broadly a Pashtun area, they don't seem to have a 
Southern Alliance like the Northern Alliance, and what's happening is that 
little local areas are getting so irritated by all the bombing they're 
overthrowing their local Taliban, but they're now concentrated in an area 
where there isn't the force on the ground to take them, and that's going 
to be the important part.

HUMPHRYS:                    So what are the priorities 
now for Britain and the United States?

GARDEN:                    Humanitarian aid I think 
is the first one, which has been flowing in really rather well, and in 
the past month the target of fifty-thousand metric tons was achieved for 
the first time, despite reports of problems caused by theft and banditry. 


                        The first aircraft with 
some aid aboard landed at Bagram airfield on Thursday. But the Americans 
have a different priority. The hunt for Osama bin Laden and the leadership 
of Al-Qaeda has become even more intense. The search is concentrated in 
two areas, around Kandahar and Jalalabad. Global Hawk, the US high tech 
surveillance drone, is in action over the likely areas. 

                        Two-hundred thousand leaflets 
were dropped  offering a twenty-five million dollar reward for Bin Laden's 
capture. US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld said `It was like snowflakes in 
a Chicago winter'. But there seems to be little expectation that Bin Laden 
can be taken alive. A Pentagon general when asked about the difficulties 
of searching  likely places said: "Our specialized approach to caves and 
tunnels is to drop five-hundred pound bombs on the entrance"; and a Saudi 
newspaper has reported that Bin Laden has ordered his aides to kill him 
if he risks falling into US hands.

                        But to guard against the 
risk of escape, the US Navy is now authorised to stop and search ships 
off the Pakistan coast. Surveillance to prevent Bin Laden escaping by helicopter 
is continuous. Yet there are still worries that Bin Laden might manage 
to make it across the border into Pakistan, and hide among supporters there.

HUMPHRYS:                    What do you think the 
chances are that they'll get him, kill him or capture him or whatever?

GARDEN:                    Well I think now the chances 
are reasonably high that they'll kill him, but the trouble is will they 
know that they've killed him, because if he is sealed in a tunnel we won't 
find him, if he's hit by air attacks he may not be found.  But the real 
question is does he want everybody to know that he's been killed and in 
that case we may well know.

HUMPHRYS:                    But of course I suppose 
we hope that somebody will give him up, somebody will go for that twenty-five 
million dollar ransom.

GARDEN:                    Well, that's certainly 
the hope, although there are indications from the United States that they 
would be probably more pleased if he was killed.

HUMPHRYS:                    Rumsfeld said that in 
effect didn't he.  He wanted to see him dead.

GARDEN:                    Probably an unwise thing 
to say, but nevertheless many of the people in the Alliance would quite 
like to see him, just like Milosevic brought to trial at some form of international 
court.

HUMPHRYS:                    Air Marshal, many thanks.