Washington ? Taliban and al-Qaida fighters are regrouping in Afghanistan after the recent end of the most biggest ground offensive of the war, and expected to try to mount attacks against U.S. troops there, Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday.

“We saw … a coalescing of a group in the area where we launched Operation Anaconda a couple of weeks ago, and very successfully eliminated a big chunk of the al-Qaida,” Cheney said.

“There are still al-Qaida scattered around Afghanistan. There are, I’m sure, going to be efforts by them to try to organize themselves enough so that they can launch an attack at least on our forces in Afghanistan. We see intelligence to that effect,” he said on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

The war effort will continue “for some considerable period of time,” the vice president said. “There’s a temptation, I think, because there’s not an active bombing campaign under way on any particular day, for people who want to run out and say, well, it’s over with. It’s not. This is a long-term commitment.”

While Osama bin-Laden has eluded capture, Cheney said he believes the al-Qaida network leader is in Afghanistan or across the border in Pakistan – if he is alive. “But we don’t know,” Cheney acknowledged.

The vice president said the United States would work to ensure that Afghanistan does not deteriorate into another “sanctuary for terrorists.” Some parts of the country have again been carved up by warlords, as was the case before the Taliban took control.

“It’s going to very difficult for us to view in the near term Afghanistan as a perfect spot,” Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. war effort, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“After the war between the Afghans and the Soviets, there was a general sense that the outside world walked away. We can’t do that again,” Cheney said on NBC.

President Bush has made it clear that U.S. forces would “stay as long as possible until we’ve wrapped up our mission of eliminating al-Qaida and making certain that we’ve dealt with the terrorist threat that emerged in Afghanistan,” Cheney said.