"We can't be satisfied until the entire network is gone, branch and root," Powell said in Pakistan

KABUL, March 17 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in Pakistan Wednesday, March 17, for talks on nuclear proliferation and stepping hunt for Al-Qaeda.

Powell flew into the capital Islamabad on board a U.S. military plane after a one-day visit to Kabul, where he met President Hamid Karzai, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Kicking off his latest South Asia tour in New Delhi Monday and Tuesday, Powell urged Pakistan to get tougher with Taliban fighters hiding along its western borders, crack down on "rebels" fighting Indian rule in disputed Kashmir and put an end to nuclear proliferation.

Washington would not be "satisfied" until the network led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan that leaked nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea was completely rooted out.

Powell said Musharraf was "as determined as we are" to put an end to proliferation of nuclear technology.

"But we can't be satisfied until the entire network is gone, branch and root," he said.

Khan confessed in February to leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea in a 12 page document submitted to President General Pervez Musharraf.

But owing to his services to national security, the President gave the scientist, called the father of the nuclear bomb, pardon without putting him on trial for the crimes he admitted.

Raids

Powell praised Pakistan's latest deadly raid against Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters hiding along its rugged northwest border with Afghanistan.

Pakistani forces lost 15 troops and killed at least 24 Al-Qaeda and Taliban suspected militants Tuesday in their bloodiest encounter to date with the suspects and locals sheltering them in the remote tribal district of South Waziristan, the military said.

U.S. military commanders have said the Pakistani and U.S. forces, operating on separate sides of the border, are creating a "hammer and anvil" scenario to trap hundreds of Al-Qaeda fighters.

Pakistan's latest offensive came after Powell urged it to step up its hunt for militants criss-crossing the frontier.

"We have been doing everything we can to encourage Pakistani leaders especially President Musharraf to be more active (in patrolling the border and preventing infiltrations by militants)," Powell said.

On March 6, an Afghan official said that Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden had escaped a recent Pakistani manhunt operation.

The external Pashto-language service of Iranian state radio reported Saturday, February 28, quoting an "informed source" that Bin Laden had been "captured in a tribal area of Pakistan" weeks ago.

On Sunday, February 22, the British Sunday Express reported that U.S. and British special forces have cornered Bin Laden in a mountainous area in northwest Pakistan, near the Afghanistan borders.

It quoted a "U.S. intelligence source" as saying that Bin Laden "is boxed in " and they were "absolutely confident" he could not escape.

But U.S. military officials have repeatedly refused to comment on speculation surrounding Bin Laden's fate.

More Aid

In his visit to Afghanistan earlier in the day, Powell said the U.S. will give Afghanistan another one billion dollars this year, bringing pledges for 2004 up to a total of 2.2 billion dollars.

Powell, who met President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, told reporters the new pledge would be made at an international donors' conference in Berlin late March.

The extra billion was already approved by Congress in November as part of a wider budget appropriation bill, but Powell is the first to announce that it would be pledged during the March 31-April 1 Berlin conference.

Afghanistan's top donors Britain, Germany, Japan and the U.S are expected to pledge some nine billion dollars over the next four years at the conference, according to German newspaper reports.

Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghazi, however, complained in Tokyo last week that his country would need 27.5 billion dollars to rebuild over the next seven years and that previous pledges "vastly underestimated" its needs.

The 4.5 billion dollars in pledges Afghanistan received at the Tokyo donors' conference in January 2002 had failed to lift it out of poverty after the ouster of the extremist Islamic Taliban regime by U.S.-led forces, he said.