By Thomas Eichler
Washington File Staff Writer

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press" September 30, said the Taliban in Afghanistan have not agreed to any of President Bush's demands for dealing with terrorist operations, and he sees no reason to believe new statements from them about the status of suspected terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

Asked about the newest Taliban claim that Osama bin Laden is now in the control of their security forces, Rumsfeld said "it was just a few days ago that they said they didn't know where he was, so I have no reason to believe anything a Taliban representative would say."

Rumsfeld said that while people have a natural desire to want to respond vigorously to attacks such as those of September 11 in the United States, the Bush administration is proceeding deliberately. "Everyone's instinct is the same," he said. "When there's an attack like that, you want to respond in kind, and the reality is that a -- the measured approach, which the president has adopted, is the right one. We need to do it right and to do that, we've got to get it right.

Rumsfeld said he did not think of the U.S. response to the attacks as "retaliation or retribution or even justice." The goal, he said, "is to be able to have dealt with the problems that exist -- in this case, the terrorist networks and the countries that harbor them -- in a way that we have won, that, in fact, they no longer are free to go out and terrorize the world.

"How that happens -- I think the president's phrase has been either bring them to justice or bring justice to them, but I think victory is probably a word that is important, because we need to live the way we live. If we're so intimidated and so frightened that we have to alter our way of life and we're not capable of going out of the house and going where we want and thinking what we want, saying what we want, knowing our children will come home from school, they've won. And we can't let that happen."

The United States, he said, also is reminding the world of the support given to Muslim states by the U.S. and other coalition governments: "We helped save Kuwait from its aggressive neighbor Iraq. We've helped in Bosnia and Kosovo and we helped with humanitarian assistance in Somalia, and there are any number of things that we've done. We're now the largest food donor, $170 million this year, in Afghanistan, for the Afghan people, who are suffering, in many respects, not from us but from the Taliban. And we intend to continue humanitarian steps to help the people of the region understand that we do care about human beings and that we are determined to stamp out terrorist networks."

The United States and its allies are capable of a sustained campaign against terrorism, Rumsfeld said. "The Cold War was not won in a year or two. It was 50-plus years that we were engaged in that, and it shows that the people in the world, free people, have steadiness of purpose and are willing to be determined and sustain an effort over a broad front over a long period of time.

"And what will happen is people ... will decide that they want to choose sides, and that when they see something that is wrong and something that is dangerous and something that is suspicious in a country across the globe, they'll tell somebody. And we'll find that information, and they'll give it to us, and we ultimately over time will be able to track down and make life so difficult, so uncomfortable, that people won't want to be in that business, and, second, people won't want to harbor people who are in that business, because it will be so uncomfortable for them to do it."

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