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Strikes target Taliban's air defenses
Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times,
The fiercest part of Sunday's opening raid was concentrated on the training camps associated with Osama bin Laden's global terrorist network. Those camps in the valleys of eastern Afghanistan were flattened in concentrated B-52 strikes with hundreds of old-style unguided "iron" bombs, officials said. Sunday's relatively small but focused strikes, involving 40 aircraft and 50 cruise missiles, was the first phase of what Pentagon officials say will be a sustained operation. Another round of bombing was being readied Sunday night that could strike targets associated with the leadership of the Taliban, officials said. "The effect we hope to achieve through these raids . . . is to create conditions for sustained antiterrorist and humanitarian relief operations in Afghanistan," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news conference. Rumsfeld appeared to confirm that there are a small number of U.S. troops now inside Afghanistan. Asked directly, Rumsfeld said he disliked discussing current operations and that there were not "significant numbers of U.S. military on the ground." Other officials have said that roughly 50 Special Forces troops specializing in liaison and reconnaissance are working with the rebels of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, but until now the officials have said those troops have operated in neighboring Tajikistan.
In an unusual departure from military practice, the U.S.-led air campaign will employ a novel strategy of combining combat attacks with relief operations. Air Force C-17 transport jets were poised to begin flying from Ramstein, Germany, to begin dropping thousands of packets of food inside Afghanistan -- a move aimed at alleviating the emerging humanitarian crisis and winning the hearts of the Afghan people.
Defense officials said 15 Air Force bombers -- B-1s and B-52s flying from Diego Garcia and a pair of B-2 stealth bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base, near Kansas City -- dropped conventional and precision-guided bombs on numerous targets. Heavy strikes were reported in the Afghan capital of Kabul and the southern city of Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual home. The B-1s and B-52s concentrated on attacking terrorist training camps, pounding them with 500-pound, Mark 82 unguided "dumb" bombs from a high altitude. The B-2s each carried 16 2,000-pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions, precision weapons guided to their targets by Global Positioning System satellites; these bombs hit early warning radars operated by the Taliban and some military headquarters, officials said. All of the bombers landed safely on Diego Garcia, but the B-2s were not scheduled to conduct additional strikes. No aircraft were damaged during the strikes, and no Afghan aircraft flew in response to the strikes, officials said. The heavy bomber force was joined by 25 F-14 Tomcats and F-18 Hornets from two aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea, the USS Enterprise and the USS Carl E. Vinson. Other naval aircraft flew electronic jamming and combat air patrol missions. "These efforts are designed to disrupt and destroy terrorist activities in Afghanistan, and to set the conditions for future military action as well as to bring much-needed food and medical to the people of Afghanistan," said Richard Myers, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He called the strikes "the early stages of ongoing combat operations." Both Rumsfeld and Myers stressed that Sunday's engagement included operations beyond the bombing and missile strikes that Myers said "may not be so visible." Rumsfeld said "covert" aspects of the attacks were designed to gather intelligence "that will enable us to be more precise in what we do, and to force people to move and change what they're doing." Other officials said that one purpose of the first wave was to see how bin Laden and his associates reacted -- that is, where they took refuge, how they communicated and how they moved. That information is likely to be used in additional strikes in coming days, the officials said. Also in coming days, special forces, launched from staging areas in nearby countries or possibly Northern Alliance-held territory in the country's north, will undertake search and destroy missions, supported by helicopter gunships and attack aircraft for pinpoint strikes. While hesitant to talk about the presence of U.S. troops, Rumsfeld noted that Sunday's attacks were coordinated with "a number of elements on the ground in Afghanistan." They include the Northern Alliance, a band of Uzbek and Tajik rebel fighters that has been at war with the Taliban for years, and groups in the south from the country's dominant Pashtun ethnic group, who dislike the Taliban and its Islamic fundamentalist leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. In an exception to the general pattern of attacking alleged terrorists and their Taliban supporters, one group of U.S. bombers hit a concentration of Taliban tanks near the major city in northern Afghanistan, Mazar-i-Sharif. Harun Amin, spokesman for the Northern Alliance, or United Front, in Washington, said that his organization was now coordinating militarily with American and other international forces, and that it had been told to remain in place while the bombing continues. "When due time comes -- when the communications have been cut, military depots destroyed and Taliban military have been reduced -- that will set the conditions for us to engage the Taliban on the ground and liberate the territories they hold," he said. "There will be coordination on when to move." The airstrikes in Afghanistan superficially resembled the opening of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In the first day of the Gulf War, the U.S. and allied onslaught included Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles, F-117 stealth fighter-bombers, F-15E fighter-bombers and a wide variety of other Air Force and Navy planes. There were more than 1,800 U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine aircraft in the Persian Gulf area at the time, U.S. Central Command said then. More than 1,400 sorties were flown into Iraq in that first wave of attacks. More than 260 cruise missiles were fired in the first two weeks of the war. The aim of the first wave was to damage Iraqi command and control centers, knock out Iraqi air defenses, and destroy Scud surface-to-surface missiles and airfields in Iraq. Allied forces continued bombing Iraqi troops in Kuwait and targets in Baghdad for six weeks before attacking on the ground. In 1998, President Clinton acting on what he said was compelling evidence about who bombed U.S. embassies in east Africa, launched major cruise missile strikes on suspected terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. The strikes involved 79 cruise missiles. The mission then was short-term, and the missiles were aimed at a complex of six suspected terrorist training camps in a remote region south of Kabul, and at a chemical plant in the northern suburbs of Khartoum, the capital of Sudan in east Africa. The targets in Afghanistan this time are far fewer and the goals much broader than they were in the Gulf War. In Afghanistan, Rumsfeld said, "there are not a lot of high-value targets," and the task is to "assist those forces in the country that are opposed to Taliban and opposed to al-Qaida." Beyond its air defense system, the Taliban's military has 40 to 50 fighter aircraft in varying states of repair, a few combat helicopters and a few dozen tanks, the senior military officer said. -- Information from the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, the Chicago Tribune and Times files was used in this report.
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