U.S. forces move into place

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 7, 2001

WASHINGTON -- With thousands of U.S. troops and hundreds of warplanes within striking range of Afghanistan, President Bush warned Saturday that "full warning has been given, and time is running out."

On the other side of the world, the hard-line clerics ruling Afghanistan lashed back at the military noose tightening around them by firing at what appeared to be a pilotless U.S. spy plane over Kabul and linking the fate of jailed foreign aid workers to any U.S. military action.

The Taliban government also announced a shuffle of high-level officials, including a new army commander, in what appeared to be an effort to isolate a faction that has been wavering as U.S. attacks grow more imminent. The moves centered on the appointment of a veteran commander from the 1980s guerrilla war against Soviet forces, Mulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani, to the top army post.

Taken together, these actions suggested that the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, had set a course for war with the United States.

Earlier Saturday morning, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld returned to Washington from military consultations with five of the region's friendly nations in as many days, and immediately went to confer with the president and senior advisers. Bush repeated his call for all nations to "stand with the terrorists, or stand with the civilized world."

The mobilization of American forces continued as elements of the 10th Mountain Division moved into Uzbekistan under a new agreement that allows them to protect American operations there, but not to cross the border to attack Afghanistan. By air and sea, other forces advanced on the region.

Nor did any other country Rumsfeld visited grant permission to carry out strikes directly from its soil, at least not publicly. Still, the administration sounded confident that it has obtained enough of the essentials -- overflight rights, limited basing rights and open political support -- to wage what it concedes will be a difficult war against Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network and its hosts in Afghanistan.

Omar, the Taliban's leader, promised in a series of increasingly strident radio addresses in recent days, that any U.S. forces setting foot in Afghanistan will face a "holy war," fought with the patriotism and willingness to die for God that energized the Afghan struggle against the Soviet Union.

Putting additional menace into that threat, the Taliban announced on Saturday that it would release eight aid workers -- including two Americans -- on trial for promoting Christianity in Kabul if the United States "stops issuing threats" of military action in support of its demand for the handover of bin Laden. The Bush administration rejected the offer and restated its insistence that its demands were not negotiable.

All-American campaign avoids limitations of a coalition

In the leadup to a possible military strike, senior administration and allied officials said Rumsfeld's approach last week had underscored that the United States intends to make this as much as possible an all-American campaign, with only logistical aid and political support from most other nations.

One reason, they said, is that the Pentagon is intent on avoiding the kind of limitations on its targets and methods that were imposed by NATO allies during the 1999 war in Kosovo, or the kind of hesitance to topple a leader that some members of the Persian Gulf War coalition felt.

"Coalition is a bad word, because it makes people think of alliances," said Robert Oakley, former head of the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism and former ambassador to Pakistan.

After meeting Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, Rumsfeld even denied in Cairo on Thursday "that there is a singular coalition, which of course is not the case. Well no, there are many coalitions. We recognize that each country has a distinctive situation and a different perspective, and we want to cooperate with countries in ways that they want to cooperate with us."

But he expressed not a word of disappointment, instead adopting an approach that could almost be summed up in the phrase: Don't ask, don't tell. At least publicly, he did not ask the leaders of Oman, Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Uzbekistan for anything but what he knew they would offer, and he studiously avoided telling much of anything about their pledges of military support.

Even in Turkey, a NATO partner where U.S. planes have routinely launched strikes against Iraq, he was careful not to speak for his host. "We do not make demands," he said in Ankara on Friday after meeting with Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit and members of the cabinet. "We do not have any view other than that each country should decide for itself how it can best help. Some help in one way; others help in another way."

"Some will do it publicly; some will do it privately; each will do it in his own way, and all of it will be helpful," he said.

With winter and holy month approaching, timing is critical

While Bush's remarks on Saturday that "time is running out" were hardly an ultimatum, the urgency of the diplomacy and the pace of mobilization seemed driven by the calendar and the weather. Winter is about to set in, the holy month of Ramadan begins in mid November, and the skies over Afghanistan are expected to be clear under a bright moon for the next few days.

One by one, in public statements and private meetings, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Oman and Uzbekistan signaled that their airfields are basically open for supporting military operations rather than offensive American strikes. The former Soviet republic of Georgia also offered its facilities and airspace.

For its part, Oman has become a critical staging ground for American aircraft and support forces massing in the region -- almost everything except combat aircraft, defense officials said. According to the New York Times, a senior military official said that dozens of KC-135 refueling tankers and AWACS reconnaissance aircraft have been based there, many of them at the air base on the island of Masirah.

Because of Oman's strategic location on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, those aircraft will be ideally positioned to service roughly two dozen B-52 and B-1 bombers as they fly toward Afghanistan. The bombers themselves are based at Diego Garcia, 2,888 miles south of Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, well within their strike range.

Oman has also been a depot for war materiel stocked by the United States for unanticipated emergencies in the Persian Gulf. As Rumsfeld left, the Pentagon announced a $1.1-billion arms sale of jets and missiles to Oman, saying it would strengthen the coalition.

Uzbekistan, where the Pentagon announced that it would send about 1,000 troops from the 10th Mountain Division, has actually wanted more troops in a semipermanent deployment, but not as an offensive strike force, U.S. officials said. The last hurdles to sending the division seem to have been ironed out on Rumsfeld's trip.

As for Pakistan, the United States has backed off the idea of using bases there, fearing the citizens would object.

Taliban: Compare fate of aid workers with that of Afghans

Diplomats working for the aid workers' release said the implication of the Taliban's offer was that the eight were now hostages to any U.S. military action, a radical shift in the Taliban's position. Only a few days ago, the Islamic judge presiding over their trial in Kabul, where they face a possible death sentence, said that the group was assured of a "fair trial," and that the crisis surrounding the Taliban's refusal to surrender bin Laden would not be allowed to influence the trial's outcome.

A Taliban Foreign Ministry statement repeated the established Taliban position, that it has not received any evidence implicating bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization in the attacks on Sept. 11, and will therefore not hand him over. For the first time in the current crisis, the statement implied that there never were any terrorist training camps of al-Qaida in Afghanistan at which suicide attackers like the men who crashed three airliners into the U.S. targets could have been trained.

"The Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan has not received any evidence against Osama bin Laden for it to examine," the statement said.

Referring to the United States, and to Afghan guerrilla fighters known as mujahedeen, or holy warriors, it continued, "If they call the military installations of the Islamic Emirates "training camps' and dub the mujahedeen as "terrorists,' then this is their mistake."

The statement went on to link the aid workers' fate to the crisis now enveloping Afghanistan, suggesting that only a U.S. decision not to attack could end the miseries of the hundreds of thousands of Afghans reported by international relief agencies to be on the move as refugees ahead of any U.S. strikes. If the United States wants compassion for the aid workers, the statement said, it should first consider the plight of these Afghans.

"If under the pretext of humanity, the eight people are important, then all those women, children and old people who have been stricken by drought, the cruel sanctions and the cold weather are important," the statement said.

It added: "If the Americans' aim is to attack their special targets of the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan, then their hands are free to do so at a later stage. If the United States mitigates the sufferings of the common people of Afghanistan and gives up its dire threats, then the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan can take steps to release those detained people."

The absence of a specific threat to the aid workers -- two American women, four Germans and two Australians accused of distributing Bibles and Christian videotapes while working in Kabul for the German relief agency Shelter Now International -- was taken as an encouraging sign by relatives of the eight awaiting the outcome of the trial in Pakistan. The father of Heather Mercer, a 24-year-old American woman, said he was focusing on the fact that the Taliban had spoken for the first time of releasing the eight without a verdict in the trial.

-- Information from the New York Times was used in this report.

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