The Taliban vowed to fight to the death against the United States and said Osama bin Laden and supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar were alive and had not been captured by opposition forces.
Confusion hung over the fate of Kandahar, however. Opposition forces said they had taken the city's airport, and the Northern Alliance said there was chaos in the city. However, Pakistani Taliban fighters coming back across the frontier said the city had not fallen.
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Afghan opposition and US sources said an anti-Taliban uprising was taking hold among tribes in the south who, like the Taliban, are predominantly ethnic Pashtuns.
Mullah Omar, the reclusive Taliban leader who lost an eye fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, was defiant during an interview on the BBC's World Service despite 40 days of air strikes and pledged to destroy the United States.
The situation in Afghanistan is part of "a big plan" including the destruction of the United States, Omar was quoted as telling the BBC Pashtun service in an interview by radio via a spokesman.
When asked whether the Taliban would participate in a future broad-based government, Omar replied: "We would prefer death to the government of fascists."
The Northern Alliance that seized Kabul on Tuesday, and has stamped its control on the capital, has said it would countenance no Taliban participation in a future government.
But with a political vacuum in Kabul, there was a flurry of diplomatic activity in neighbouring Pakistan with US special envoy for Afghanistan Mr James Dobbins in talks with officials in Islamabad.
US Defense Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld said last night his priority was capturing bin Laden. He said the search was still on but would take time.
"Finding handfuls of people is indeed like finding needles in a haystack and it's a complicated process," he said.
Bin Laden has a $5 million price on his head, and analysts say an anti-Taliban uprising in the south has increased the chances of him being captured.
"The circumstances on the ground have changed dramatically just in a matter of days, and places that were probably safe for him 48 or 72 hours ago are no longer safe for him," Mr Cheney said.
But he warned that the Taliban and bin Laden's al-Qaeda fighters could still mount a guerrilla campaign from Afghanistan's mountains.
US aircraft last night bombed and destroyed a building where top al-Qaeda terrorist leaders were thought to be gathered.
The strike included the use of a remote-control Predator spy aircraft armed with missiles. A number of people were killed.