Troops go in

Ministers have warned Osama bin Laden that the net is closing in around him.

Speaking on Sunday, the Northern Ireland secretary, Dr John Reid, said: "We believe that he is in Afghanistan but wherever he is he will find that he can't hide and I'm confident we will obtain that objective, which is the primary objective of this campaign. Bin Laden can hide but ultimately, I believe, we will find him. At the moment we are concentrating on Afghanistan."

Amid reports that bin Laden had escaped war-torn Afghanistan, Dr Reid conceded that the terror chief was proving difficult to find, but said the government believed he was still in the country.

"He is an elusive foe and that is why we had to undertake this campaign in the first place. It is an immensely difficult task even in that limited area inside Afghanistan. We will pursue him by all means at our disposal," he said.

Foreign Office minister Ben Bradshaw also predicted that bin Laden's time was running out. "Tracking down bin Laden and his associates is much, much easier now than it was a week or two ago," he said.

Over 100 British troops have gone in on the ground in Afghanistan ahead of an expected bigger military and diplomatic deployment in the next few days.

The troops, who are part of the Special Boat Service, landed near to the Bagram airbase to prepare the ground for more troops.

They will hunt for mines and work with the Northern Alliance to prepare the way for more flights. They are making the area safe for further military, humanitarian and diplomatic missions.

But the deployment of British troops has prompted concerns that they will be met with resistance and hostility from the war-hardened tribal warlords of the Northern alliance.

Shadow defence secretary Bernard Jenkin told warned Sky News that: "We've got to be very careful we don't insert troops into a situation where they are regarded as intruders or they become participants in the civil war in Afghanistan."

His comments mirror growing concerns in the West over prospects for a broad based UN-led Afghanistan government following the faster than expected collapse of the Taliban.

"We've got to recognise the Northern Alliance have their own agenda, it's not an agenda for a broad-based administration in Kabul, and that's becoming glaringly obvious," warned Jenkin. "If it's impossible for troops to operate because they're going to be harassed by the Northern Alliance well then we've got a problem."

Bradshaw responded with assurances that the British troops were not under threat. "The (Northern Alliance) foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah has said he is perfectly content for those forces to remain where they are, he recognises they are doing a very important job securing the airport for humanitarian and diplomatic missions," he told Sky news.

David Blunkett said the strategy was correct. "The bulk of those who are leading the various factions have welcomed the limited intervention so far. All of us want a rapid, diplomatic input and solution, but we are dealing with warring tribes," he told the BBC. "Let us be cautious but optimistic but let us move quickly to feed people and to put together a government that can actually bring stability to this war-torn region."

As anti-war protesters gathered in London on Sunday, Liberal Democrat spokeswoman Dr Jenny Tonge argued that the West's bombing campaign did not "do much good at all".

"Diplomacy may have succeeded from the very beginning in achieving exactly the same result, combined with intelligence and SAS type-troops going in to catch the terrorists," she told GMTV.

Calling for stability to enable a proper humanitarian relief operation to get underway before Afghanistan's harsh winters set in, Dr Tonge said that the deployment of British troops should be a "temporary" measure and should be replaced by a UN force.

"I do think there is a sort of air of only Britain and the US can sort this out thing out," she said. "I think people resent that, and quite rightly too. I hope very quickly the UN take over and come to some arrangement with all the warring factions within Afghanistan."