WASHINGTON/ISLAMABAD, 31 October — The United States and its allies yesterday scrambled to dispel fears of their military campaign on Afghanistan foundering in its fourth week with fierce air raids and reassuring rhetoric. US warplanes unleashed more fierce assault at Taleban positions near the village of Ai Khanun on the second day of air raids on a new front line opened Sunday near the Tajik border, witnesses said.
They also bombarded the Taleban’s Kandahar stronghold, the capital, Kabul, and front-line positions blocking a threatened Northern Alliance offensive near the key northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, officials of the ruling militia said. The Pentagon said US warplanes, with 95 sorties planned for the day, focused on strikes in support of opposition forces, directing their raids at Taleban positions across northern Afghanistan from Kabul to Mazar-e-Sharif.
The commander of the US-led military action rejected any suggestion that operations were at a stalemate. The United States blames the attacks on Osama Bin Laden, his Al-Qaeda network of extremists and the Taleban, their protectors and allies who have ruled Afghanistan since 1996. Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of US forces in the Gulf and the Middle East, speaking in Tashkent after talks in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan sought to allay fears of failure.
"We are committed to this as long as it takes and my view is that it is not at all in stalemate," Franks said. "I can tell you that my boss, the secretary of defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and the president (George W. Bush) have not indicated to me any frustration with the pace of the operation.
"We will undertake our operations at a timeline that is satisfying to us," he said. "We want this operation to be measured, we want this operation to focus on targets and target sets. We want to conduct this operation on our timeline, and I think that we are on that timeline at this point."
Despite repeated US assurances that the campaign is going as planned, a mounting civilian death toll, growing fears of a huge humanitarian disaster and escalating — sometimes violent — protests in the Muslim world have been the most visible results so far.
In addition to gaining widespread hero status among hard-line Muslims, Bin Laden has been impossible to find, as has his chief ally, Mulla Muhammad Omar, whose Taleban appear as strong as ever after stiffly resisting nearly a month of massive US air raids and ground attacks by the domestic opposition.
Residents of Kandahar said US jets bombed military targets in the devastated city for up to five hours, but seemed to spare civilian areas. Four people were killed in the strikes, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) news agency reported. In Kabul, the Taleban claimed a US bomb destroyed a water supply center, AIP said, reporting overnight attacks in Paktika province in the east and the western city of Herat.
The United States has released a new list of some 200 individuals it suspects of having links to September’s attacks, Britain’s financial regulator said in London yesterday. Britain has received the list, compiled by the FBI, and is sharing it with banks but will not publish it, said Patrick Humphries, a spokesman for the Financial Services Authority. "There is a new list and we have received it," he said. "But it is not something that will be made public.
"We will give the list to the banks to see if any names match but there are some sensitivities attached to it. It is a confidential list," he told Reuters, declining to give details. Washington, seeking to stop the flow of criminal money, is asking national regulators to supply bank account details for individuals named in the list.
Al-Muhajiroon organization in Pakistan said about 700 British Muslims are fighting alongside Taleban. Abu Ibrahim, a spokesman of the organization, told Arab News that the British Muslims entered Afghanistan earlier this month along with Arab Afghans.
Meanwhile, Sudan’s Foreign Minister Dr. Mustafa Othman Ismail disclosed yesterday that the Khartoum government had engaged in talks with the American administration during the time of President Bill Clinton in 1996 on handing over Osama Bin Laden. Speaking to Asharq Al-Awsat, he said the Clinton administration let this opportunity slip by.
This is the first official confirmation of US-Sudanese negotiations in this regard. He said Washington, which was at that time trying to overthrow the regime in Khartoum did not want to give any impression that it was negotiating with it. "This led to the failure of that effort," Ismail pointed out.
The strikes, Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said, targeted Taleban command and control sites, as well as so-called "emerging targets" — mobile military assets such as armor, artillery, vehicles and troops.
Taleban military intelligence chief Qari Ahmadullah claimed 500 US and allied military personnel were already on the ground in Afghanistan. "The majority of these people are in Faizabad, the center of Badakhshan" — the only Afghan province fully controlled by the Northern Alliance.
No independent confirmation of the Taleban claims was immediately available. An opposition spokesman said the report was false.In New York, The New York Times newspaper reported that US intelligence officials had secretly sought assistance from their Syrian and Libyan counterparts to defeat Bin Laden. In one of the encounters, a senior member of the US Central Intelligence Agency met Syrian colleagues in Damascus earlier this month — although the country remains on a US list of terrorism sponsors.
The meeting, The Times said, followed earlier talks in London between CIA and US State Department officials and the chief of Libyan intelligence. Iran, an implacable foe of the Taleban and another country Washington has been courting for its anti-terror coalition — although still listed as a sponsor of terrorism — yesterday ruled out any "contact or dialogue" with the United States.
Concerns over the raids were particularly high in Pakistan, Washington’s key regional ally, as heavily armed Pashtun tribesmen with cross-border ethnic links to the Taleban continued to mass on one side of the border and large numbers of Afghan refugees gathered on the other.
President Pervez Musharraf has called for the strikes to end before the holy month of Ramadan, which starts on Nov. 17, and his Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz reiterated the stand yesterday. "We would like it (the military action) to be concluded sooner rather than later," he told the East Asia Summit in Hong Kong. The White House said Bush would meet Musharraf on Nov. 10 in New York.
On Washington’s home front, the number of victims of the anthrax-by-mail attack continued to mount and US Attorney General John Ashcroft warned that another wave of anti-American attacks was under way. "The administration has concluded ... that there may be additional terrorist attacks within the United States and against US interests over the next week," Ashcroft said Monday.
In Washington, a US law enforcement official said that since Sept. 11, the US government has disseminated lists of names of people it would like to talk to in connection to the attacks. He said the list changed constantly. The United States has decided the best way to get the names out without making them public is to advise relevant organizations or sectors involved, the official said.
"They’re in no way suspects. We’re trying to be prudent. We certainly aren’t trying to publicize it too much, we’re trying to be careful about not infringing on peoples’ rights," he said. Financial sources in the City of London said the new list ran to over 400 names with aliases and contained no details. Many names were transliterated Arabic, making it difficult for the investigators as well as banks seeking matches.
Taunts by the Taleban that the US air campaign has been a failure were met with the 24th straight day of assaults on the regime’s stronghold of Kandahar in the south of the country. Residents said US jets bombed military targets in the devastated city for up to five hours but seemed to spare civilian areas. Residents told AFP the city, deprived of water or electricity for over two weeks, had been left a filthy mess with scavengers roaming around.
"They’re like dogs, creeping into what’s left of people’s houses at night, trying to find something to eat," one resident said, adding that dangerous health conditions had been made worse by the weather, with winter conditions looming. "It’s freezing overnight but extremely hot during the days. People are defecating anywhere they can and in the heat of the day the flies are everywhere."
Afghanistan’s anti-Taleban Northern Alliance yesterday mobilized hundreds of extra village-based and regular fighters to boost positions in front lines north of the capital Kabul. Up to 500 fighters were seen gathering at a former Soviet army camp near this opposition nerve center some 80 kilometers north of the Taleban-held capital, to receive a first batch of new uniforms and new lodgings. Many of the soldiers had arrived in civilian clothes, and were recruits from surrounding villages in the Shomali plain that sweeps north of Kabul.
Mounting international concern over the impact of the bombing campaign on Afghanistan’s civilian population was underlined by comments from UN High Commissioner for Refugees chief Ruud Lubbers. The Dutchman expressed concern over the possibility of a drawn-out campaign and the absence of any progress on the political front.
"I’m concerned about that (the indefinite duration of the military campaign). That is related to my other concerns that up to now we have no indication of political progress," he told reporters after meeting Musharraf.
Rumsfeld said late Monday that three weeks of bombings had cleared the way for what he called "phase two" of the campaign — which is widely expected to involve the deployment of ground troops. A senior US defense official said plans for a commando base inside Afghanistan to support opposition forces fighting the Taleban were under consideration but that no decision had been taken.
UN special envoy for Afghanistan Lakhdar Ibrahimi also discussed the conflict with Musharraf. Ibrahimi’s spokesman said the two men agreed a settlement in Afghanistan would have to guarantee its territorial integrity and any post-Taleban government would have to be devised by Afghans and reflect all groups in the diverse land.
They also agreed Afghanistan should not be allowed to become a playground for militants such as Bin Laden. "The future government will maintain friendly relations with all its neighbors and will not allow its territory to be used for hostile acts against its neighbors or anyone else," UN spokesman Eric Falt said, summing up their conclusions.
