Tribal and US forces were last night pursuing groups of fleeing al-Qaeda troops south towards the Pakistan border only a few miles away, following the surrender of their last Tora Bora defensive positions.
Opposition military successes, in a battle that, agencies said, saw 200 al-Qaeda fighters killed and 25 captured, were marred, however, by their failure to find Osama bin Laden. British and US special forces were involved in the heavy fighting.
Some reports suggest bin Laden is among those heading for Pakistan, whose border is being heavily guarded by its troops, but US officials were playing down such claims and earlier ones that they had intercepted radio messages indicating he was in the Tora Bora area. "We have certainly been receiving an awful lot of transmission traffic," the US commander, Gen Tommy Franks, told ABC's This Week.
He said "we're not sure" whether it was him. "We have no reason to believe that he has been either killed or captured. We don't know where he is," the Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, said.
Special forces were involved in careful searches of captured cave complexes and among bodies of fallen fighters. "I think it's accurate to say that it's going to be a while before we have the area of Tora Bora fully under control," Gen Franks said.
"It's physically a matter of digging out the al-Qaeda from these caves and tunnels... It's a matter of inching our way forward up the sides of these canyons and physically going into each one of these bunkers and caves," he said.
At Bagram airport outside Kabul, the US Defence Secretary, Mr Don Rumsfeld, arrived on a surprise visit to the troops and the leader interim government, Mr Hamid Karzai, after visiting three former Soviet republics. He is the most senior foreign official to visit the liberated capital.
"We want to make sure that we are all on the same wavelength as to what's left to be done," Mr Rumsfeld said.
"From the very beginning, we have tried to make it clear that our operation here was not against Afghanistan, against the people, against a religion. It was against terrorism," Mr Rumsfeld told Mr Karzai as they met in a wrecked Soviet-era aircraft hangar.
"The United States coveted no territory. We were here for the sole purpose of expelling terrorists from the country and establishing a government that would not harbour terrorism." Mr Rumsfeld also told reporters that items recovered from an abandoned terrorist training camp in southern Afghanistan over the weekend by US forces were being tested for evidence of weapons of mass destruction. He said the US discovery of a deserted al-Qaeda camp yielded a large and significant amount of items.
The US National Security Adviser, Ms Condoleezza Rice, said on CBS the United States took bin Laden "at his word when he says that it is a religious duty of the al-Qaeda network to acquire weapons of mass destruction ... A lot is being found in these houses, in the places that are being raided, that suggests they were trying at least to acquire these weapons of mass destruction."
On Tora Bora, the local commander, Mr Hazrat Ali, was delighted as he announced that the eastern alliance had taken control of all caves in the area and warned "anyone who paves the way for al-Qaeda forces to live in the White Mountains will be given capital punishment." "This is the last day of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan," said Mr Mohammed Zaman, the eastern alliance defence chief.
"There is no more need for American bombing. Our men have the situation under control." Smiling eastern alliance forces chanted "al-Qaeda is finished! Al-Qaeda is finished!"
