U.S. Positioning Forces Around the World

Afghanistan has been singled out by U.S. officials for allegedly harboring terrorists — among them Osama bin Laden, who President Bush said is a “prime suspect” in the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S.

But Rumsfeld said today bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization, which operates in 60 countries, is just one of many networks that have garnered U.S. attention.

“What we’ve been doing since the day of the attack is getting our forces positioned in various places around the world,” Rumsfeld told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“This is not an Afghan problem,” he said. “This is a worldwide problem of terrorist networks.”

Rumsfeld said the military would continue to arrange U.S. forces “so that at the point where the president decides that he has a set of things he would like done, that we will be in a position to carry those things out.”

The defense secretary also confirmed today the U.S. military had lost contact with an unmanned spy plane, but he gave no details on the plane’s location and said the U.S. had no reason to believe it had been shot down.

The Taliban said yesterday it had shot down an unmanned drone aircraft in northern Afghanistan, but did not know where the plane came from.

Also yesterday, the U.S. activated an additional 5,172 National Guard and reserve troops, raising the total number of Air National Guard Air Force Reserve troops activated to 10,303.

Meanwhile, Air Force B-52 bombers, capable of dropping or firing long-range cruise missiles and other weapons, left Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana for an undisclosed location, the Associated Press reports.

The U.S. has stationed 350 warplanes at land bases and on two aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean regions, according to Reuters.