McChrystal: Killing bin Laden is key

Washington -- Days after his boss said there was no new intelligence on the whereabouts of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan told Congress on Tuesday that killing or capturing bin Laden is critical to defeating the terrorist organization.

But Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal said he could not promise that the new military strategy would lead to bin Laden's capture because when the al-Qaida leader moves outside of Afghanistan, chasing after him "is outside my mandate."

McChrystal's comments underscored a key contradiction in President Barack Obama's new Afghanistan strategy: While it dedicates thousands of additional troops to combating the Taliban in Afghanistan, it adds few resources aimed at the policy's stated goal of "disrupting, dismantling and defeating" al-Qaida.

"I believe he is an iconic figure at this point whose survival emboldens al-Qaida as a franchise organization across the world," McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "I don't think we can defeat him until he is captured or killed."

In the past week, top administration officials have offered conflicting statements about what the United States knows about bin Laden's whereabouts. While McChrystal suggested Tuesday that bin Laden is in Pakistan, retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones, Obama's national security adviser, said Sunday that bin Laden sometimes crosses the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. And over the weekend, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told ABC's "This Week" that the United States had not had strong intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts for years.

Bin Laden has eluded U.S. capture since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The special operations task force assigned exclusively to find bin Laden was disbanded by 2005.

McChrystal and Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. envoy in Afghanistan, appeared before the House and Senate Armed Services committees Tuesday to answer questions about the Obama administration's new Afghanistan strategy, which calls for the deployment of between 30,000 and 35,000 additional U.S. troops by next summer. Most of those troops are to be assigned to southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban control large swaths of the county.

Besides improving security, those forces are expected to train Afghan security forces to take over. McChrystal said he expects the Afghan security forces -- police and army -- to expand to 300,000 by July 2011 -- when Obama said U.S. troops would begin to withdraw. The total currently is about 188,000.

McChrystal said he had not recommended July 2011 as the date to start the withdrawal. But he said that date provides the United States enough time to weaken the Taliban's hold and build up the Afghan security forces. He did not say what the United States would do if U.S. forces hadn't made that kind of progress by then.