Killing Bin Laden key to Al Qaeda Defeat: McChrystal

WASHINGTON : Killing or capturing Osama bin Laden is the key to defeating the al Qaeda terror network, the top US military commander in Afghanistan told US legislators on Tuesday.

“I believe he is an iconic figure at this point whose survival emboldens al Qaeda as a franchising organization across the world,” said General Stanley McChrystal, testifying in Congress about the US military surge of forces in Afghanistan.

“It would not defeat al Qaeda to have him captured or killed, but I don’t think that we can finally defeat al Qaeda until he’s captured or killed,” McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

US officials believe that bin Laden — considered the chief mastermind of the attacks of September 11, 2001 on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people — is hiding along the mountainous Afghan-Pakistani border.

US ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, also testifying at the hearing, said that capturing or killing bin Laden “does remain important to the American people — indeed, the people of the world.”

McChrystal and Eikenberry testified about the renewed push in the Afghan war after President Barack Obama ordered an additional 30,000 troops to the country.

US national security adviser James Jones told CNN on Sunday that the latest intelligence reports suggest that Bin Laden “is somewhere inside north Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border, hiding in very, very rough mountainous area, generally ungoverned.”

However Defense Secretary Robert Gates, also speaking Sunday, said in an interview that Washington did not know where bin Laden was and had lacked reliable information on his whereabouts for years.

A recent Senate report said Bin Laden was “within the grasp” of American forces in late 2001 but escaped because then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected calls for reinforcements.