Operation Anaconda, the Pentagon's name for the current fighting occurring in Afghanistan near Gardez, may be ending "in days, not weeks or months," according to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Speaking with defense employees at a town meeting on March 7, Rumsfeld said "[I]t strikes me that it should end ... sometime this weekend or next week." However, he prefaced his remarks by saying, "I don't think it's knowable at the moment."

Commenting further on the ongoing combat operations, Rumsfeld said, "It's very hard to know what's going in and out of that area. We think we have observation posts everywhere that one needs them, so that people can neither get in nor out. But we can't be certain of that. And there's no doubt in my mind ... that an awful lot of people have been trying to get out and haven't been making it. But we can never know if it's all the people that were trying to get out."

Asked about steps being taken to seal off Afghanistan's border to Iran and Pakistan in order to prevent the escape of Taliban and al-Qaida fighters, Rumsfeld said, "[T]heir borders are porous. The area is populated by tribes that have, through hundreds of years, been moving back and forth across those borders like the borders aren't even there. The terrain is rugged." Preventing small numbers of people from escaping across the border is "something that's not really doable," he said.

"It is doable if one's talking about very large forces," Rumsfeld continued. "And fortunately, the Pakistani government has been just enormously cooperative. They have large numbers of soldiers along the border." He added that the United States is getting help from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, but that the border with Iran "is as porous as it ever has been, going both ways."

Focusing specifically on Operation Anaconda, Rumsfeld said, "[W]e have people all the way around the al-Qaida and Taliban folks who are in there ... so that people cannot get in there to reinforce ... or get out...."

Asked how the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians affected the war on terrorism, Rumsfeld said "The president of the United States and Secretary [of State] Colin Powell and the ambassadors have been continuously involved for the past 12 months in working with both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian conflict. I am pushing 70 years old, and that conflict's been going on ... all of my adult life."

"It is unlikely you're going to solve it, to be perfectly honest. Not impossible, but it's very, very difficult," Rumsfeld said. "But if you're not trying to work the problem, it can get worse and deteriorate into a much more lethal conflict," he said.

The secretary called the recent Saudi initiative interesting, characterizing it as "a step beyond what a good many other of Israel's neighbors have been willing to say for some time."

As for how much the conflict affects the war on terrorism, Rumsfeld said "If you talk to some of the neighboring states that are concerned about the Palestinian problem from the standpoint of their own stability, there's no question they will tell you that dealing with that problem is of the first order and it needs to be tamped down so there's less violence if the war on terrorism is going to continue to be successful." However, he noted that the United States is receiving "very good cooperation from any number of the countries" in that region.