WASHINGTON/LONDON, 14 October — As US jets and missiles pounded Afghanistan yesterday, the United States appeared to be preparing to shift its war against terrorism from the air to the ground in Afghanistan.
Dozens of people are reported killed when a 2,000-pound bomb missed a Taleban military target at Kabul airport overnight and struck a residential neighborhood of the Afghan capital, US defense officials said. The casualties occurred in Qila Mir Abbas village situated about two kilometers south of the airport. The Pentagon said the bomb missed the target and blasted civilian houses.
A CNN report said a US Navy jet was aiming the bomb at a helicopter over Kabul and that it missed its target by about 1.6 kilometers. “We heard two very large explosions,” a resident in the city’s northern flank said as the first bombs were dropped. “The explosions appeared very close.” The resident said jets mounted another raid about 40 minutes later with two more explosions occurring further away from the city and appearing to be not as large as the first attack.
In continuing airstrikes yesterday and last night war planes dropped three bombs on Kabul causing huge explosions that rocked the city and creating a fireball over the airport, a witness said.
“Two bombs landed on the airport,” the witness said. “There was a big fireball that lit up the sky,” he said.
US missiles yesterday knocked out Taleban radar networks in Baghlan and Herat provinces AIP reported.
AIP said cruise missiles fired at Pul-e-Khumri in Baghlan and Pul-e-Pushtoon in Herat heavily damaged the Taleban radars.
A cruise missile also targeted an army camp west of Kandahar, the headquarters of the Taleban in southern Afghanistan, but caused only minor damage. “The camp was empty,” a Taleban source told the news agency.
According to an eyewitness cited by the AIP, a large fire had broken out around a major Taleban military compound in the northeastern part of Kandahar. He said that several missiles had fallen on civilian areas.
The agency also said that civilian casulaties were feared in the bombing raid in Jalalabad.
In a message broadcast by the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television network early today Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network has threatened more suicide jetliner attacks against the United States and Britain.
Bin Laden aide Suleiman Abu Ghaith said in a recorded message: “The storm will not calm as long as you (the United States and Britain) do not end your support for the Jews in Palestine, lift your embargo from around the Iraqi people, and have left the Arabian peninsula,” he said.
“We tell and recommend Muslims not to get on airplanes and not live in towers and high buildings” in the countries which have carried out air and missiles strikes against Afghanistan, he said.
Opposition Northern Alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said yesterday US strikes on positions of Afghanistan’s ruling Taleban have robbed their fighters of the ability to launch a counter-offensive.
He said that hundreds of “ Arab-Afghans” were killed in American air raids in Kandahar.
US President George W. Bush declared yesterday the first phase of the US military campaign against Osama Bin Laden a success, saying nearly a week of bombing had disrupted Bin Laden’s support networks in Afghanistan.
US Vice President Dick Cheney alluded for the first time Friday to the possible use of ground troops as the air war against Afghanistan continued.
Asked whether President George W. Bush had a masterplan for the military campaign, Cheney told PBS public television that “the capabilities are all pretty much signed up to in advance.”
“I mean, you know you’re going to have an intelligence piece of it; you know you’re going to have a military piece that’s probably going to involve air, maybe some special ops, so-called boots on the ground, et cetera.”
Speaking in his weekly radio address, Bush also sought to reassure Americans, unnerved by the discovery of four anthrax cases, that the federal government was taking “strong precautions” to protect Americans from retaliatory attacks.
“We have disrupted the terrorist network inside Afghanistan,” Bush said. “American forces dominate the skies over Afghanistan and we will use that dominance to make sure terrorists can no longer freely use Afghanistan as a base of operations.”
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff also hinted Friday that the war was about to enter a new stage, that might include crack special forces troops.
“As we said before, this will be a sustained effort. And many of the conventional efforts that you see today are stage-setters for follow-on operations,” he said. “Some of those efforts may be visible, but many will not.”
The Taleban rulers yesterday rejected an offer by US President George W. Bush to halt air strikes if they handed over Osama Bin Laden, saying they would fight until their last breath.
Taleban supreme leader Mulla Omar ruled out handing over Osama Bin Laden and appealed again to Muslims everywhere to help defend his country.
In London, British Minister for International Development Clare Short said yesterday the United States and its allies have no plans to launch a broad-based land invasion of Afghanistan and will not carry out “blanket bombing.”
“There isn’t going to be a mass land invasion,” she told BBC Radio 4. “There will be some activity ... I don’t think the concept of swarms and swarms of troops all over Afghanistan is going to happen ... This is not just a classical war.”
“We should always avoid any loss of civilian life. That is an agreed strategy and that must be very carefully taken forward.”
She described air drops in Afghanistan by the US Air Force of food and humanitarian supplies as necessary “both to get people fed now and to stock up the warehouses so Afghanistan can get through the winter, when the roads will be much more difficult to move food across.” NATO Secretary-General George Robertson told CNN’s Larry King Live show US troops posted in the Balkans may be redeployed to Afghanistan if the US war against the Taleban intensifies.
US forces currently make up between seven and 12 percent of NATO forces in the Balkans, amounting to around 10,000 troops, the NATO chief said.
They, along with “highly specialized assets” such as unmanned aerial vehicles and pilotless planes may be redeployed to Afghanistan.
Afghanistan’s opposition alliance yesterday claimed fresh victories and Taleban defections, but the extent of their coordination with US-led air strikes remained unclear.
A senior opposition commander, Atta Muhammad, said the alliance had wrested control of three villages within 20 kilometers of Aibak, the capital of Samangan province in the north of the country.
He said three Taleban commanders and 80 soldiers had also defected to the opposition overnight Friday.
Opposition forces have said they are close to taking Aibak and another key provincial capital, Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan, which would help open supply routes from their northern command bases.
“Our forces are advancing rapidly,” opposition spokesman Muhammad Ashraf Nadeem told AFP by satellite telephone, adding the main target for the anti-Taleban coalition remained the strategic northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.
US forces have pounded Taleban targets in Mazar-e-Sharif, opposite the Uzbek border where US crack troops have been deployed, but so far the opposition has failed to take advantage of the situation.
“If the Taleban continue to be as weak as they are, these cities will soon fall,” Nadeem said, without elaborating on the strategy of the anti-Taleban forces.
Another opposition spokesman, Ahmad Bahram, said the Taleban had launched a heavy offensive against opposition strongholds around Bamiyan, south of Mazar-e-Sharif.
He said the attack focused on Shahidan, 20 kilometers west of Bamiyan city, the capital of the Hazarajat region dominated by the Hazara minority.
“The Taleban brought newly arrived forces to stop our men advancing and infiltrating the city,” Bahram said.
He said the area was strategically vital for control of Bamiyan and had frequently swapped between the opposition and the Taleban recently.
The opposition has also claimed victory in Shahrak district, 100 kilometers southwest of Chaghcharan, central Ghor province.
The Afghan opposition said yesterday that it had not reached a deal with the United States to delay an offensive on Kabul, saying its forces could strike within days.
“There is not such an agreement. It is my belief that military considerations will be evaluated independent of the political situation,” opposition spokesman Abdullah Abdullah told journalists in Jabal Seraj.
He was responding to questions about whether a deal had been reached with Washington to hold off on an offensive on the Afghan capital to allow time for a political framework for a post-Taleban government to be put in place.
An opposition commander in Bagram criticized Washington for not bombing the Taleban front-lines in the air and missile assault on Afghanistan now in its seventh day.
He said the failure to target the front-lines was preventing the opposition Northern Alliance, otherwise known as the United Front, from pushing forward toward the capital.
Reports from Dushanbe said Tajikistan sent reinforcements to its border with Taleban-controlled areas of Afghanistan yesterday as Russian forces here reported fighting overnight on the Afghan side.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a border official said 500 soldiers, all members of Tajikistan’s special border guard, and 20 armored vehicles had been sent to the southern region of Piandj, which borders both Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.
Separately Russian border guards helping guard the border reported fighting inside Afghanistan near the Tajik border.
The press service of the Russian border guards, also in the region of Piandj, said they had heard artillery fire from the Afghan village of Khodjagar, around eight kilometers inside Afghanistan’s border with Tajikistan.
They also said they had heard bombing and artillery fire around 10 kilometers from the border.
Two aircraft also flew over the region during the night, around four kilometers from the border, they said without elaborating.
Around 11,000 Russian border guards are helping guard Tajikistan’s border with Afghanistan.
In Khwaja Bahauddin, US planes dropped several tons of food supplies overnight Friday-Saturday, AFP observed.
An unknown number of aircraft dropped thousands of yellow plastic sacks containing individual daily rations several kilometers south of Khwaja Bahauddin, a small place in the north of Takhar province under the control of the anti-Taleban Northern Alliance.
