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By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 16, 2001; 4:12 p.m. EST

GREAT LAKES, Ill., Nov. 16 – Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that U.S. special operations forces are engaged in ground combat in southern Afghanistan, operating inside the country for days at a time and "killing Taliban that won't surrender."

Rumsfeld also said that he had reviewed verbal and written reports that Mohammed Atef, military commander of Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden's terrorist al Qaeda network, had been killed in a U.S. airstrike.

"Do I know for a fact that's the case? I don't," Rumsfeld said. "The reports I've received seem authoritative. And indeed, he was very, very senior, number two, something like that. We have been obviously seeking out command and control activities and have been targeting them and have targeted successfully a number of them, particularly in the last five or six days."

Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, in a press briefing later in the day at the Pentagon, said the reports of Atef's death were received after a U.S. airstrike "a couple of days ago."

"If in fact, Atef has been killed, that will have an impact on their future operations . . . ," Stufflebeem said. "Osama bin Laden no longer has a principal assistant that he has been counting on for developing military or terrorist operations. If he has, in fact, been responsible for the personal security of Osama bin Laden, then that describes to me an environment where that individual is now going to feel much less secure about where he is, what may happen to him next."

Rumsfeld discounted reports that bin Laden and Taliban leader Mohammad Omar have been flown from Afghanistan to Pakistan. "There is no reason to believe he's in Pakistan," Rumsfeld said of bin Laden. "There's every reason to believe he's in Afghanistan, as is the case undoubtedly with Omar."

But Rumsfeld said it is possible that bin Laden still has the use of one or more helicopters that he could use to flee Afghanistan. "I don't doubt for a minute that there are some well hidden helicopters that we can't find and they are undoubtedly available to the senior people . . . and it is possible to run down a ravine and not be seen," Rumsfeld said. "It is also possible to climb on a donkey or a mule and just walk across the border. There are no guards there. It's not like there's a big barrier up."

In his briefing, Stufflebeem also acknowledged reports from Afghanistan that Omar has told his forces to leave the embattled city of Kandahar in the southern part of the country. But he cautioned that U.S. military leaders don't put a lot of confidence in those reports.

"I don't believe it," he said. "I think that our forces who are there still operating under an assumption that it's a hostile environment, and I think that the opposition groups are probably operating in the same way."

Rumsfeld, speaking to reporters before and after attending a graduation ceremony at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, made his most expansive comments to date on the role of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. A number of special operations teams from the United States and other coalition countries, he said, are moving around the contested southern part of the country in an effort to foment anti-Taliban rebellion by Pashtun tribal leaders, some of whom are now working directly with the U.S. military.

Those forces have "gone in and are staying for periods of time," Rumsfeld said. "They're looking for information, they're interdicting roads, they're killing Taliban that won't surrender and al Qaeda that are trying to move from one place to another. They're doing assessments with respect to places we can land aircraft."

Asked if those activities constitute ground combat, Rumsfeld said: "The answer is yes. . . . In the south, they've gone into places and met resistance and dealt with it."

In northern Afghanistan, Rumsfeld said, U.S. forces came close to being "overrun" along with Northern Alliance troops north of Mazar-e Sharif earlier this month as a battle ebbed and flowed but called in U.S. airstrikes that successfully halted a Taliban attack.

Stufflebeem, asked about Rumsfeld's remarks, said the U.S. forces are "doing strategic reconnaissance. They are ready to engage in direct actions if and when they positively identify enemy or have to defend themselves. I have not seen reports that they, in fact, have done that. . . . What I'm trying to display is that there's not a sense that there is a group of forces that are roaming the country and looking to engage in fights."

Elsewhere in the north, Rumsfeld said, al Qaeda forces – for the most part Arabs and other non-Afghans – continue fighting for their lives around Kunduz in fierce combat.

"Were they Afghans they could melt into the scenery," Rumsfeld said. "Were they Afghans they could defect and switch sides. The Afghans putting pressure on them are unlikely to want someone to switch sides if they're not Afghans, particularly if they're al Qaeda. Once they were cut off from Kabul . . . they had really only one choice, which was to surrender or fight, and they chose the latter."

Rumsfeld said they have made attempts to surrender, to no avail. "It's still going on," he said. "There have been attempts to get them to surrender, but the basis on which they wanted to surrender was not acceptable. They wanted conditions, and there aren't conditions."

A number of senior Taliban leaders, Rumsfeld said, have been captured by the opposition Northern Alliance and will be interrogated by the U.S. military. "We do have some names, and they were not privates, some of them," Rumsfeld said.

He also said that a number of al Qaeda leaders have been killed. "I'm sure that's the case, but I do not have a laundry list of their names or really good validation of that," Rumsfeld said.

The situation in the south, he said, has been marked by increasing anti-Taliban rebellion by Pashtun leaders. "The tribes in the south that have been relatively inactive have become more active, they have been moving into towns and villages and cities, putting pressure on Taliban to leave, which they are doing," Rumsfeld said. "They are in varying degrees talking to each other and us. In some cases we have people with those tribes, in some cases we don't. In some cases we're in communication, and in some cases we're not."

Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, is meeting with the National Security Council today in Washington to review battlefield options in light of the Taliban's swift collapse, but Rumsfeld said that there would be no new war plan.

Franks's battle plan, he said, would be "modestly recalibrated" at most. "It was designed from the beginning to be sustained over a considerable period of time. It was designed to apply pressure in a lot of locations. It was designed to make the circumstance of al Qaeda and Taliban difficult so that options were reduced and they had to move and not be able to function effectively. It's playing out that way."

Rumsfeld also left no doubt that airstrikes and ground operations would continue through the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins tomorrow.

"We are determined to find the leadership of Taliban and al Qaeda and we're determined to find them as rapidly as possible and stop them from committing terrorist acts around the world," Rumsfeld said.

Before meeting with the editorial boards of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, Rumsfeld showed reporters photographs of U.S. Special Forces troops riding into battle in Afghanistan with fighters from the Northern Alliance.

"The Rumsfeld transformation," he joked, referring to his own efforts to "transform" the U.S. military into a high-tech, 21st century fighting force.

He also displayed a photograph of a donkey used by the Northern Alliance to transport food and ammunition. "Literally, I have seen drop orders," Rumsfeld said, "that included saddles, bridles and horse feed."