ISLAMABAD, Oct 29: United States jets on Monday targeted caves and bunkers believed to be in use by Osama bin Laden and his associates as Washington sought to shake off the impression that its offensive was floundering.
As the Pentagon announced raids on underground hideouts in the east of Afghanistan, the Taliban mocked the US attacks as ineffectual and claimed to have arrested an unspecified number of Americans within the country.
The relentless airstrikes entered their fourth week with no end in sight, no sign that the Taliban’s grip on power was weakening and no reports that the anti-Taliban opposition forces had yet gained any ground.
The US warplanes opened a new front on Sunday, bombing for the first time Taliban positions in northeastern Afghanistan close to the Tajik border.
In the wake of the bombing on the new front, three top leaders from the Northern Alliance met to agree to mount an assault on the key northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
The assault will be supported by US airstrikes and a small number of US special forces military advisers.
Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum and fellow Northern Alliance commanders Mohammad Atta and Haji Mohammad Muhaqiq met on Sunday in the Dara-i-Souf valley and “approved a new war plan”, a spokesman for Atta said.
“A new offensive will begin within the next two or three days,” he said.
Taliban forces have so far repulsed a series of offensives aimed at capturing the strategic town with support from US airstrikes.
US and British officials were also forced to defend the strikes against growing reports of mounting civilian casualties and an imminent humanitarian disaster as thousands of refugees flee ruined Afghan cities.
Rumsfeld accused the Taliban of lying about the civilian toll and of using mosques and schools as ammunition dumps and command centres.
The Taliban mocked the US war effort and claimed to have captured a number of Americans.
“The only significant achievement these intensified air raids brought the Americans is a wave of anti-American campaigns throughout the world,” the Taliban’s ambassador to islamabad, Abdul Salam Zaeef, said at a press conference.
The Taliban are known to be holding a number of foreign nationals — including a French, a Japanese and two Pakistani journalists arrested since the strikes began— and have warned that they could face trial for spying.
US special forces and intelligence agents are operating within Afghanistan, but Zaeef said he had no information as to who had been captured.
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke, when asked about the claimed arrests, said: “I have nothing on that.”
The armed anti-Taliban opposition, a loose coalition fighting under the banner of the Northern Alliance, also warned that the US attack was a long way from toppling the Taliban.
“The perception might have been that the Americans started bombing and we will be in Kabul and Kandahar. This is not the way things will happen,” Northern Alliance spokesman Abdullah Abdullah said.
“There are two messages: the United States has to be patient, and things could have been done better and can be done better,” he said while talking to reporters at a news conference in the opposition-held town of Jabal Seraj.—AFP
