BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan - The top US commander in Afghanistan said Tuesday his forces will keep working "very, very hard" to find Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and Taliban fugitives, despite difficult terrain and bad weather.
"We don't know where he is: if we had a good definition we would have had obviously apprehended him at this point. I think that it is very difficult and I can't really speculate," Lieutenant General David Barno told reporters.
Barno said US troops would continue the hunt for Bin Laden and other senior Taliban leaders including Mullah Mohammed Omar.
"Those senior leaders out there, the Hekmatyars, the Mullah Omars, OBLs, -- the hunt for them will continue," he told a briefing at Bagram air base, the US military's headquarters in Afghanistan.
More than three years after the US toppled Afghanistan's Taliban regime which had sheltered Al-Qaeda, its troops are no nearer finding Bin Laden, the one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar or former Afghan prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is wanted for terror attacks.
Barno said the 18,000 US-led coalition troops faced a difficult challenge because of "the immensity of the territory involved, the mountainous terrain, tough weather.
"We'll continue to work very, very hard. I don't think I can really characterize how close or how far we are -- our proximity to those targets," he added.
Bin Laden and wanted Taliban leaders are thought to be hiding in the rugged tribal borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan but Barno said the US could not pinpoint his location.
Earlier Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said in an interview that traces of Bin Laden were lost last year after Pakistani forces came close to knowing his whereabouts.
Musharraf told the BBC late Monday that intelligence agencies had their clearest indications eight to 10 months ago about the whereabouts of Bin Laden but then the trail went cold.
Barno said in the last six months there had been a "dramatic downturn in enemy attacks" in Afghanistan.
Last year had represented a "very important turning point" in Afghan history, he said.
Eight million people turned out to vote in Afghanistan's first presidential election in October and fears of major attacks by Taliban insurgents failed to materialise.
"In February, for example we saw the lowest level of enemy attacks of all types across the country in two years," Barno said.
He added that attacks by insurgents would likely rise as the weather warmed in April and May but a government-backed effort to offer amnesty to many Taliban fighters would have a "dramatic" effect on the insurgents.
"There may be opportunities for non-criminal Taliban to come back and rejoin the people of Afghanistan, the political process and the economic growth," Barno added.
03/15/2005 12:40 GMT