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Politics : Right Wing Extremist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: U Up U Down who wrote (18411)	10/17/2001 11:49:18 PM
From: U Up U Down	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 59480

US is just playing around, says Northern Alliance By Marcus Warren in Bagram, northern Afghanistan (Filed: 18/10/2001) THE first American strikes against front-line targets north of Kabul left anti-Taliban commanders distinctly unimpressed yesterday. Some military chiefs even complained that their enemy's morale was higher now than before the air campaign began. The negligible scale of the allied air raids on the military outside the Afghanistan capital had convinced the Taliban that America was "just playing around", one senior commander of the Northern Alliance forces said, citing reports from spies and "connections" in Kabul. An unidentified plane was seen banking away over the mountains soon after two explosions a few miles south of the front line yesterday afternoon in what appeared to be the first daylight raid in the area. Three bombs were dropped on Taliban positions six miles from Bagram, Afghanistan's largest air base, from early evening on Tuesday until dawn yesterday, the general in charge of the ruined airport confirmed. All the overnight bombs hit their target and one destroyed a small convoy of cars near a Taliban post, Gen Babajan said. Before the attack, the cars had their lights on but afterwards there was only darkness and the vehicles had been "smashed to bits", he said. The strikes made good a threat earlier this week by Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, that the front line would not "be a very safe place to be". Since the bombing began 10 days ago, Taliban fighters have sought shelter from the raids on Kabul by commuting by car to their positions near the Northern Alliance forces to the north of the capital. The Taliban's vehicle lights can easily be seen across the plains. However, Gen Babajan, who voiced the fears of many commanders of opposition forces at the weekend when he accused America and Pakistan of a plot to thwart any Northern Alliance advance on Kabul, was unenthusiastic about the attacks. "Do you think three bombs will make much of a difference?" he asked, sitting in the shade at his command post behind the bombed out airbase buildings. To observers on the Shamali plains, America appears to be doing the bare minimum to keep its allies fighting the Taliban happy but is determined not to encourage them to move on and to capture Kabul. There was even speculation that the bombs dropped overnight had been left over from other sorties and expended in an attack on B-list targets. One senior Northern Alliance commander expressed the fear that the minimal intensity of the bombing was strengthening the Taliban's resolve to resist America. Jan Akhamat, deputy military chief of Parvan province said: "Before the bombing, the Taliban were worried about what sort of attacks would happen. Now the attacks are like this and their morale is better." He added: "They think the Americans are just playing around. These three bombs are not enough. In fact they will mobilise the Taliban and make them stronger." Confidence in America, never high among anti-Taliban commanders, and faith in the likelihood of any significant military alliance with Washington, are evaporating rapidly. "The United States is doing its own thing for its own benefit here," said Commander Akhamat, a sentiment shared by most of the anti-Taliban military leadership as well as many ordinary people. Washington's close co-operation with Pakistan, long an ally of the Taliban's extremist regime and hostile to the Northern Alliance, has only confirmed the suspicions of those fighting the Taliban on the ground that they are being used as cannon fodder by the West .http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/10/18/war118.xml&sSheet=/news/2001/10/18/ixhome.html "Let your plans be dark and as impenetratable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt." - Sun Tzu, The Art of War