WASHINGTON - It is called Tora Bora, or "black dust," a series of caves and redoubts carved into the remote White Mountains of northeastern Afghanistan, hard up against the border with Pakistan. U.S. and Pakistani officials believe it is the likely lair of Osama bin Laden and hundreds of his most ardent followers.
It is a perfect place to make a last stand, they say, or perhaps try to slip across the border to safety.
U.S. military officials and Northern Alliance forces are increasingly focusing on this mountainous cave complex southwest of Jalalabad that is accessible only by foot or mule over narrow, stony trails.
Built in the 1980s as a defense against Soviet forces, Tora Bora might have been further improved and enlarged in recent years by bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network, officials say.
American warplanes have concentrated airstrikes for the past several days on the mountains that house these caves and tunnels. And now an anti-Taliban chief is boasting that he will make an assault with his troops. Hazrat Ali, security chief for eastern Nangarhar province, told the Associated Press on Friday that other local leaders have reached the same conclusion.
"All of the leaders of Nangarhar have taken the decision to eliminate the Arabs that are in Tora Bora as soon as possible," he said, noting that a delegation has been sent to try to negotiate a surrender at what he called an impregnable fortress.
Army Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the campaign in Afghanistan, told reporters last week that he is particularly focusing on two locales. First, the southern city of Kandahar, the spiritual and military stronghold of the Taliban militia. Second, the forbidding terrain stretching from the capital, Kabul, east to Jalalabad and southeast to the Khyber Pass, a rough triangle that contains Tora Bora.
Franks said a variety of intelligence information - everything from rebel reports to pictures provided by U.S. drone aircraft - points to both locations as likely sanctuaries for bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorists.
"Those are the areas we have been led to pay very close attention to," the general said.
U.S. military officials will say little of Tora Bora or any plans for it. "We can't talk about that. We want to keep it under wraps," one officer said.
Vice President Dick Cheney said last week that he believes bin Laden, whom the United States blames for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, is probably around Tora Bora.
