KABUL — Osama bin Laden's appearance in a defiant videotape redoubled the difficulties of the new Afghan government on Thursday in bringing peace and rebuilding a land where the militant and his al Qaeda fighters are at large.
A Defence Ministry spokesman said bin Laden was in hiding in Pakistan under the protection of supporters of a radical Islamic leader who helped create the fundamentalist Taliban. The cleric, Maulana Fazalur Rehman, swiftly dismissed the report.
"This is a political gimmick," Rehman told Reuters.
One pocket of al Qaeda resistance was in Afghanistan and under pressure after tribal guards surrounding eight Arab fighters holed up in a hospital in southern Kandahar said they were running out of patience and might storm their ward.
In a sign of potential problems between the new Afghan government and the U.S. military whose bombing campaign helped to sweep them to power, interim leader Hamid Karzai ordered an inquiry into U.S. strikes on a convoy of tribal elders.
Karzai had agreed to ask the United States to halt aerial attacks on eastern Paktia province where a caravan of guests to his weekend inauguration was bombed with many killed last Thursday, a tribal chief from the region told reporters.
The bombing adds to Karzai's myriad problems, multiplied by the possibility bin Laden is alive and at large in his country.
But Defence Ministry spokesman Mohammad Habeel said bin Laden was no longer Afghanistan's problem, saying he had taken refuge in Pakistan, which should launch a hunt.
"Osama himself is under the protection of Maulana Fazalur Rehman in Pakistan, but we don't know for sure in which part," Mohamad Habeel told Reuters.
"He lives in areas which are under the influence and control of Fazalur Rehman supporters," he said. "Bin Laden and his men are no longer here."
Habeel represents the Northern Alliance, the main component of the new interim government that has long had poor relations with neighbouring Pakistan and which is keen to see bin Laden outside Afghan frontiers.
"This is not serious," Rehman, a long time supporter of bin Laden and his protectors, the former Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, told Reuters from his home in the North West Frontier Province town of Dera Ismail Khan.
Rehman is head of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam party and has been under house arrest for three months after he organised many of the protests against the U.S. war on Afghanistan.
The report is certain to enrage Pakistan, which has deployed huge numbers of army troops and paramilitary forces along its porous 2,400-km (1,500-mile) border with Afghanistan to prevent the entry of bin Laden and his supporter—hundreds of whom have been arrested trying to enter.
Bin Laden may be confined to a shrinking corner of Afghanistan, he may even be dead, but the broadcast on al-Jazeera television on Wednesday of what appears to be a recently recorded videotape shows he may well have evaded the might of the world's most powerful army in trying to trap him.
The hunt will only intensify for bin Laden, alleged mastermind of the September 11 hijacked airliner attacks which destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center, sliced into the Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 people in the United States.
Dressed in a camouflage jacket, a Kalashnikov propped beside him as ever, bin Laden looked gaunt and greyer.
He seemed undaunted, but less jubilant than in the private amateur video recovered from a house in Afghanistan and shot some time in early November in which he chuckles and smiles.
"Our terrorism against the United States is blessed, aimed at repelling the oppressor so that America stops its support for Israel," he says in the tape—almost a challenge to the United States to try to track him down.
"He wanted to show...that he is alive," said Pakistani editor Hamid Mir, the last person to interview bin Laden in a secret meeting in Afghanistan on November 8.
Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said a day earlier that pockets of al Qaeda were active in southern Afghanistan.
In southern Kandahar, eight wounded Arab al Qaeda members had locked themselves into their hospital ward since Tuesday, a day after shooting broke out in the hospital when Afghan fighters tried to flush them out and took one of their comrades.
Since then security guards have tried to persuade them to surrender, so far without success. And they say they are not prepared to allow the standoff to go on much longer.
"We told them that if they don't surrender peacefully, then we will be obliged to use force, and we can't tolerate this situation any longer," Ismail Khan, a security guard appointed by Kandahar Governor Gul Agha, told Reuters.
Al Qaeda's tenacious hold in remote deserts and mountains in this landlocked country is prompting the arrival of more U.S. troops on the ground, and more bombing which is complicated by the increasing difficulty of identifying targets on the ground.
Up to 40 people were killed when U.S. jets bombed eastern Paktika province early on Thursday, said sources in Pakistan's border tribal rim. "The attack took place when the people were asleep," said one source quoting witnesses from Naka village.
Among the houses destroyed was the home of one commander in the vanquished fundamentalist Taliban, Maulvi Taha, said the private Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP).
One tragic error may have taken place last Thursday when a convoy packed with tribal elders—apparently double-crossed—came under attack in neighbouring Paktia province en route to the inauguration of Karzai's government at the weekend, leaving about 65 people dead, witnesses and survivors said.
"Mr Karzai has promised to...ask for the halt of America's bombardment," Abdul Hakim Munib, a representative for Paktia's 50-member-tribal council, told a news conference.
"He (Karzai) said he has appointed a team to verify the issue and find the culprits," Munib said.
Locals said tribal foes may have passed on incorrect information to the Pentagon, calling in planes to bomb it.
U.S. officials have insisted the convoy had opened fire on U.S. aircraft just before it was bombed and had been carrying leaders of al Qaeda and former fundamentalist Taliban rulers.
Munib said people hostile to the elders in the convoy had incorrectly informed the United States that the travellers were supporters of the Taliban and members of bin Laden's al Qaeda.
Swiftly shifting alliances in Afghanistan—where defections from the Taliban were crucial to their defeat—could contribute to confusion over just who was in the convoy.