WASHINGTON, Nov 1: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Thursday he will press to increase fourfold the number of US special forces teams inside Afghanistan to step up the war against the Taliban, adding the effort has been slowed by bad weather and in one instance by hostile fire.

“But we have a number of teams cocked and ready to go,” Rumsfeld told reporters. “I’ve expected it to happen every day, and I’m sure it will in the days immediately ahead.”

The United States has intensified its bombing of Taliban positions across northern Afghanistan in recent days in a shift the Pentagon attributed to the deployment of small numbers of ground-based US special forces.

The ground troops, operating in the north, have found and designated air strike targets the Pentagon hopes will help opposition forces move against the Taliban.

They also are providing communications, food and ammunition to their poorly-armed opposition allies.

Rumsfeld emphatically denied the shift in US tactics favouring the opposition Northern Alliance was prompted by the failure of US efforts to put together a broad coalition to govern Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.

Some analysts have suggested US forces held back air strikes on the Taliban frontline north of Kabul to keep the Northern Alliance from taking the Afghan capital before post-Taliban political arrangements were in place.

“It is absolutely false, unless there is something that I simply am totally unaware of, which I doubt,” Rumsfeld said.

The air campaign proceeds according to plan, Rumsfeld said, focused first on Taliban air defences, next on its broader military infrastructure and finally on its forces in the field, especially those arrayed against the Northern Alliance.

“The reason we did it in that sequence is because we did not have people on the ground who could help with the targeting,” he said. “And we do now have some. Nowhere near as many as we need, and not with all of the elements that are opposing Taliban and al-Qaeda.”

“And so the best work is being done where we do have those special forces on the ground, but it was not some master plan that we concocted, that we wanted Joe to reach Kabul instead of Mike. Those are, I’m sure, not Afghan names,” he added.

Rumsfeld would not reveal how many US special forces are now on the ground with the opposition, but said he would like three or four times that number to go in. Foul weather and other problems have hampered their movements in country, he said.

On one occasion a team was unable to land because of ground fire, though it suffered no casualties.

“The ground fire was simply too heavy to unload the folks. And so they went back, and they’ll try it again in a different landing area,” he said.

Rumsfeld said US forces were providing food and ammunition to other opposition forces in central and western Afghanistan, and would try to get special forces in with them as well.

General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said 55 strike aircraft took part in Wednesday’s raids, which struck principally around Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul and the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in the south.

Myers showed video images taken from F/A-18 and F-14 fighters of strikes Wednesday on caves in the mountains around Kabul used to hide people, munitions and equipment.

In one, a cave in a mountain ridge erupted into flames as it was hit by a precision guided munition.

Addressing persistent criticism the campaign has bogged down, Rumsfeld said the campaign had made “measurable progress,” comparing it to World War II.

Noting the smoke was still rising from the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York, he said the conflict was still in its “very, very early stages.”—AFP