U.S. Wages All-Out Campaign of Bombs and Aid Packages
By THE NEW YORK TIMES / October 7, 2001
Gen. Richard Myers, left, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that Sunday's strike were designed to cripple Taliban air defenses.
The following article was written and reported by Thom Shanker, Steven Lee Myers and David Stout
WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 — The Pentagon said today that it is waging an all-out campaign against terrorists in Afghanistan, using missiles and bombs on terrorist outposts while dropping packages of food and medicine to alleviate the suffering of the Afghan people.
The military phase of the campaign — begun just before noon Eastern time (eight and a half hours later local time in Afghanistan) — started with the firing of 50 cruise missiles from British cruisers and submarines.
The missiles were soon followed by attacks by 15 land-based bombers and 25 F-14 and F-18 strike jets from the carriers Carl Vinson and Enterprise, dropping precision-guided bombs as well as more conventional explosives in wave after wave of thunderous barrages, according to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"Operations continue as we speak," Mr. Rumsfeld said at a briefing in Washington shortly before 3 p.m. Taliban air defenses and suspected terrorist training centers were among the main targets.
"They will be dust," one senior military official said of the training camps.
Military officials said the operation presaged at least a week of punishing air strikes against Taliban posts, and that some missions may be carried out in daylight. "If we've done our job with their air defenses, there's no reason not to keep our planes up all the time now," one official said.
The secretary said it was much too early to evaluate the success of the mission. No ground forces were involved in today's operation, and there was no indication by Pentagon officials that they were about to be deployed.
The ruling Taliban has anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles to repel air attacks, but Mr. Rumsfeld said that, as far as he knew, no attacking aircraft had been shot down or damaged.
The officials said the operations were carried out by B-1 heavy bombers, by B-52's, and by B-2 stealth bombers. The B-52 has been a workhorse of the United States Air Force for more than four decades, while the B-2 stealth is an ultra-modern, wing-shaped craft designed to evade radar.
The B-1 and B-52 bombers flew from the British-controlled island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Pentagon officials said the B-2 bombers had flown to the attack zone from their home base in Missouri. But instead of flying back to Missouri, they landed on Diego Garcia, raising the possibility that they will take part in further missions.
Almost simultaneous with the bombing operations, other aircraft were dropping some 37,000 humanitarian-aid packages of food and medicine on regions of the Afghan countryside far removed from the military operations, Mr. Rumsfeld and the general said. They said the humanitarian packages, plus leaflets meant to sway the Afghan people, were dropped by giant cargo planes that flew from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, crossing the air space of the former Soviet Union.
Mr. Rumsfeld gave particular thanks today to Britain when he reiterated the theme that the United States has the cooperation of many freedom-loving nations who are contributing in a war that has military, diplomatic, economic and intelligence phases.
(Not long before the Pentagon briefing, Prime Minister Tony Blair told his countrymen that his government and his nation's armed forces were as one with the United States in the battle just begun. Mr. Blair noted that Britain was among the many nations that lost people in the carnage at the World Trade Center, but he added, "Even if no British citizen had died, it would be right" to join the American effort.)
Mr. Rumsfeld said today's strikes were designed to foster conditions more conducive to fighting terrorism, in part by crippling Taliban air defenses and air power and, more broadly, to hammer home the message that there is a terrible price to pay for countries and organizations that do business with or coddle terrorists.
Today's operations, coming just a day after President Bush warned that time was running out for the Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi exile suspected of plotting the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Mr. Rumsfeld said today's attacks were just the early phases of a "measured, broad and sustained" campaign to root out terrorism.
"There is no silver bullet," the secretary said, asserting that, with perseverance by the United States and its allies, terrorist organizations like Mr. bin Laden's would "collapse from within."
As if to counter Mr. bin Laden's repeated descriptions of America as a land of infidels who have warred on Islam, Mr. Rumsfeld cited episodes in recent history, like the 1991 Persian Gulf war, in the which the United States has used its might to oust invaders out of Muslim countries.
Despite the prominent speculation about Mr. bin Laden and his well-documented hatred of the West, Mr. Rumsfeld said the campaign begun today is "not about a religion, or an individual terrorist, or a country."
To characterize the operations in Afghanistan as being aimed at the Afghan people would be "flat-out wrong," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
The target, Mr. Rumsfeld said, is terrorism in general, "a cancer on the human condition." |
