BAGRAM AIRBASE, Afghanistan - United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has become the first senior US official to visit Afghanistan since the Taleban's fall, reassuring Afghans that Washington does not covet their land.
Rumsfeld landed at Bagram Airbase near Kabul as US warplanes continued round-the-clock bombing of the suspected last strongholdof Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda fighters in eastern Afghanistan.
It was the first visit by a senior American official to the country since Afghan and US forces pushed the hard-line Islamist Taleban from power last month.
Designated Afghan defence minister Mohammad Fahim greeted Rumsfeld at the airport. He sat down to talks with Hamid Karzai, who heads a six-month interim government taking power next week.
The venue was an upstairs room in a wrecked Soviet-era aircraft hangar, burned skeletons of destroyed Russian-made MiG fighter jets littering the tarmac outside.
"From the very beginning, we have tried to make it clear that our operation here was not against Afghanistan, against the people, against a religion. It was against terrorism," Rumsfeld told Karzai.
"The United States coveted no territory. We were here for the sole purpose of expelling terrorists from the country and establishing a government that would not harbour terrorism."
Karzai told Rumsfeld the Afghans were thankful for US help in battling terrorism and the Taleban.
"We were incapacitated earlier to deal with so many things at once in the country. You came on board and provided help for us -- provided the opportunity that we wanted," he said.
Rumsfeld told troops later he expected an international peacekeeping force for Afghanistan would not be large, and be put in place sometime after Karzai is due to take over.
"It will be a relatively small force, taking 3,000 to 5,000 at most," he said. "Their (Afghan leaders') present hope is that there will be a security force put in place some time after December 22."
"It will be a coalition of the willing. It'll be four or five countries. Very likely the United Kingdom will be involved, possibly Germany, possibly Turkey and maybe one or two others."
