U.S. bombers waged their heaviest attacks yet on the Taliban’s front line around Kabul on Saturday, even as thousands of tribesmen from neighboring Pakistan vowed to join the Islamic warriors, and opposition forces in the north said they were running out of ammunition, with no sign of promised U.S. arms in sight.
The offensive by a dozen B-1 and B-52 bombers lasted most of the day. Witnesses called it the fiercest such assault on the Kabul front since the start of the air campaign on Oct. 7.
Rebel troops have been complaining that the U.S. air strikes weren’t doing enough to advance their cause before winter hampers their offensive. The ammunition shortage comes as the Northern Alliance prepares to open a second battle front around the strategically vital northern Afghanistan city of Mazar-e Sharif.
Chances for significant ground operations in coming days seem slim, however, because of the arrival of fierce storms that have turned most of northern Afghanistan into a copper-colored bowl of swirling dust.
Estimates of the number of Pakistanis moving out in buses, trucks, pickups and vans ranged from just over 1,000 to more than 5,000. The men, young and old, had massed in Temergarah, near the Afghan border, Saturday morning with assault rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers, even axes and swords.
Pakistan’s government is supporting the U.S. campaign, but a substantial portion of the country’s Islamic population vehemently opposes the government stand.
The mobilization came in response to a call for holy war last week from Sufi Mohammad, an outspoken Muslim cleric who runs a religious school in a nearby town. Mohammad contends that, contrary to claims from Washington, the conflict in Afghanistan pits Muslims against the rest of the world.
“For the first time, all the anti-Islamic forces are united against Islam,” Mohammad said Friday.
Pakistan’s tribal belt along the Afghan border is notorious for its armed men, its fundamentalist ideas and strong support for their Pashtun cousins in Afghanistan.
As winter and the Islamic holy month of Ramadan approach, the Bush administration is struggling to make progress in its campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, the terrorist group accused in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.
Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, suggested in an interview with ABC News that the nature of the conflict poses the threat of a long entanglement for the U.S.-led coalition.
“If the military objectives are such that their attainment is causing difficulty . . . then yes, it may be a quagmire,” he said.
Separately, Musharraf told reporters after meeting with Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok that he hopes the campaign could end soon.
“One can only hope and wish that the military objectives are achieved and it remains as short as possible,” he said.
The Bush administration plans to announce hundreds of millions of dollars in additional aid to Pakistan. New grants could total $300 million to $500 million and may be announced as early as this week, administration officials said.
A week after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the United States was prepared to supply arms to the Northern Alliance, there was no sign of any such aid other than a report that Russia was preparing to send surplus tanks and armored vehicles to the fighters in Northern Afghanistan.
Baryalia Khan, deputy minister of defense for the Northern Alliance, said Saturday that ammunition reserves for the opposition forces remain “seriously low.”
CIA said to be in charge
A senior Pentagon official said the CIA, not the U.S. military, is in charge of supplying arms to Afghan opposition forces. A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment.
Tons of humanitarian aid for starving Afghans, meanwhile, are bottled up at the Uzbekistan-Afghanistan border, stymied by political wrangling and nearby fighting.
In Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban is mainly to blame for the turmoil in that country.
“There is no doubt that the leadership in Afghanistan bears the largest part of the responsibility,” he told reporters after a meeting with French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine. It was one of the more pro-U.S. statements to come out of Saudi Arabia, which has lent only tepid support to the U.S. campaign, refusing, for example, to allow its air bases to be used by U.S. warplanes for strikes on Afghanistan.
The U.S. commander in charge of the Afghan campaign, Army Gen. Tommy Franks, met with Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd on Saturday, according to the Saudi Press Agency. Franks heads the U.S. Central Command, the Tampa-based military headquarters in charge of the region stretching from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia, including Afghanistan.
In Washington, the U.S. Supreme Court announced through its spokesman Saturday that the court will meet Monday in a different location, a response to the discovery of trace amounts of anthrax at an off-site Supreme Court mail handling center. The high court will hear arguments in the ceremonial courtroom of the U.S. Court of Appeals, marking the first time the justices have been forced out of their building across the street from the U.S. Capitol since it opened in 1935.
No leads in anthrax case
Domestic law-enforcement and U.S. intelligence officials said Saturday that they have reached no conclusion about who is responsible for the anthrax attacks, or even whether the attacks have been coordinated by a single individual or group.
“We’re just not there yet,” a U.S. intelligence official said.
U.S. investigators said they have discovered no evidence tying the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with the subsequent anthrax offensive launched at public officials and media organizations through the U.S. mail.
Nearly 5,000 people were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, which the U.S. believes were masterminded by Al Qaeda, based in Afghanistan, and backed by the Taliban. Three Americans have died as a result of anthrax exposure; 11 others have contracted the disease and are being treated; thousands of mailroom workers, postal employees and public employees are taking medicine against the possibility they may have been exposed.
The Washington Post reported Saturday that some U.S. investigators are leaning toward the theory that the anthrax attacks were domestic in origin and may be attributable to right-wing hate groups.
Study points to 1 person
Meanwhile, investigators say handwriting analysis and profiling point to a single person having written all three letters found to have been contaminated with anthrax.
Letters to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and The New York Post appear to be photocopies. The block lettering on the third letter, to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), is similar to the lettering in the New York Post and Brokaw letters. Investigators say the author of the letters was proficient in English but that English was not his or her first language.
“It’s hard to express how angry I am about these attacks, how proud I am of the brave response on the part of my staff and dedicated postal workers, the Capitol police, and so many others, and how deeply saddened I am by the loss of life,” Daschle said in the weekly Democratic response to President Bush’s Saturday radio address.
Spending the weekend at his Camp David, Md., retreat, Bush threw his support behind a House version of the airport safety bill, one that would not require federalization of airport baggage security personnel. A Senate-passed bill that would mandate that all passenger and baggage screeners be federal workers “is well intended,” Bush said, but lacks flexibility.
The White House is backing legislation allowing private contractors, operating under federal standards, to conduct screening duties. Last week, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer suggested that work rules for federal employees might make it difficult for the government to discipline federalized airport security workers who failed to do their jobs.
Bush thanked Congress for swift passage of anti-terrorism legislation that greatly expands law-enforcement investigative powers, particularly in the area of electronic surveillance.
“For a long time we have been working under laws written in the era of rotary telephones,” Bush said. “Under the new law, officials may conduct court-ordered surveillance of all modern forms of communication used by terrorists.”
Also on Saturday, friends and family mourned Joseph P. Curseen Jr., the second Washington-area postal worker to die from anthrax.
“His death was a terrible waste of life and goodness,” said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. “We can’t let evil take charge. We have to keep going.”
