WASHINGTON/KABUL, 8 January — British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived at the Baghram air base in Afghanistan last night for the first visit to Afghanistan by a Western head of government in decades. The US warplanes also intensified the bombings on the Al-Qaeda fighters holdouts yesterday. Blair, who flew in from Pakistan and was due to spend only a few hours on the ground, said his visit underlined the international commitment to Afghanistan, and praised British troops taking part in peacekeeping duties.
"I wanted to come to Afghanistan not just to thank our forces for the great job that they’re doing but also to make clear to the new interim administration that our commitment to Afghanistan is for the long run," he said in a statement. "The international community is here to help for the long term, but Afghanistan’s future is in the hands of the Afghan people and that is exactly how it should be."
Afghanistan’s interim leader, Hamid Karzai, greeted Blair and his wife, Cherie, when they flew into Baghram, which lies 50 kilometers north of the Afghan capital of Kabul. They were also welcomed by several hundred British and United States troops. "We would only have been glad to offer you the security to go to Kabul," Karzai told the British leader. Blair replied: "Unfortunately we have to do it this way."
As they headed off for a meeting held in a hangar at the airport, they crossed paths with the delegation of influential US senators who arrived earlier for wide-ranging talks with Karzai. The US bombing of Afghanistan entered its fourth month yesterday, with an unofficial thumbs up from the United Nations and no sign of a letup in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and his allies. US warplanes intensified attacks in eastern Afghanistan and US ground troops searched a former training camp near the Pakistani border where Al-Qaeda fighters had been regrouping, the Pentagon said yesterday.
Victoria Clarke, the chief Pentagon spokeswoman, said US forces launched four airstrikes in the Khost and Zhawar Kili areas on Sunday, one of the most active days since last month’s battle for the cave complexes in the Tora Bora mountains.
Clarke provided few details on the airstrikes but they included another attack on the former terrorist training camp at Zhawar Kili, a sprawling compound and cave complex near the Pakistani border that US intelligence believes was being used by Al-Qaeda fighters as a place to regroup.
The Afghan Islamic Press agency reported that US troops landed Sunday aboard four US helicopters and were combing the area with Afghan troops. The area around Khost, which shares a mountainous border with Pakistan, has become the focus of the US military’s hunt for fleeing Al-Qaeda fighters.
