World Trade Center Attack

U.S., Britain Launch Attacks : The First Strikes

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Electricity in Kabul was cut as soon as Monday’s attacks began, plunging the city into darkness for a second night. It appeared that the power had been switched off by officials of Afghanistan’s militant Islamist Taliban rulers.
Officials said four cities were targeted as part of what President Bush promised would be a long assault after the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States: Kabul and Jalalabad, in the east; Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold in the south; and Mazar-e-Sharif in the north.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Monday that the targets “tend to be congregated in the north,” and the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press agency reported near midnight that a fifth city in the north, Kunduz, was also hit.

U.S. forces met little resistance Monday, said Gen. Richard Myers, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “There have been, to the best of my knowledge, no air-to-air engagements,” he told reporters at a news briefing in Washington with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“We are generally pleased with the early results” of Sunday’s attack, Myers said, but “we do not believe they got all of the command and control sites” supporting the Taliban or al-Qaida, the terrorist network overseen by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, whom U.S. officials blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

REBEL OFFENSIVE CONSIDERED IMMINENT

NBC correspondents in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic along the northern border, reported that the identities of the U.S. targets strongly signaled an imminent major offensive by the Northern Alliance, a collection of rebel groups that controls about 5 percent of Afghanistan.
The airport at Mazar-e-Sharif, a prominent target of U.S. bombs and missiles, is a key component of Taliban control in the north, and its destruction or disabling would be a significant boost for rebel forces.
Kabul and Jalalabad, meanwhile, are major cities relatively accessible to rebel forces in Uzbekistan under the command of Gen. Abdur Rahid Dostum, a onetime government official whose loyalties have shifted several times in the past decade.

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AIR ATTACK ON THE NORTH

British forces, which joined Sunday’s initial attacks, were not involved Monday, U.S. and British officials said. Myers said Monday’s attacks involved 10 bombers, 10 fighter jets and an unspecified but relatively small number of Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Rumsfeld confirmed reports that cruise missiles were only a small part of Monday’s action because U.S. officials believed that their effectiveness was likely to be limited against the relatively small number of fixed targets in Afghanistan.
He said there had been a public “misunderstanding that some sort of cruise missile is going to solve that problem, because it is not going to do that.”
“I think that we ought to have a clear understanding what is possible in a country like that,” Rumsfeld said. “That country has been at war for a very long time. The Soviet Union pounded it and pounded it and pounded it for years” during its occupation in the 1980s.
“It is largely rubble. ... What we are doing is that which is largely doable.”
Rumsfeld said repeatedly that the U.S. action was targeted solely at command and control installations supporting al-Qaida and the Taliban, and that damage to civilian structures in Kabul was the result of Taliban anti-aircraft fire, not Western bombs.
Rumsfeld described U.S. targets “as carefully selected. They tended to be in remote areas, and they were all very low-collateral-damage targets.”

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SUPPLEMENTARY EFFORTS UNDER WAY

The United States paired the military attacks Monday with a second humanitarian air drop of food over Afghanistan, as well as a diplomatic effort to lay the groundwork for assaults outside the country.
At the United Nations, U.S. diplomats delivered a letter informing the Security Council that “we may find that our self-defense requires further actions with respect to other organizations and other states.” Analysts have mentioned Iraq as one such nation.

In addition, George Robertson, secretary-general of the NATO alliance, will travel to the United States later this week for discussions of NATO’s role, Rumsfeld said.
The Taliban cabinet responded Monday by endorsing a call by a meeting of clerics to declare a jihad, or holy war, saying the Afghan people would sacrifice all for honor.
Anti-U.S. protests gripped cities in neighboring Pakistan, where the military leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, removed several key military officials over the weekend because of their previous support for the Taliban.

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LONG-TERM CAMPAIGN

Rumsfeld said the United States would not be deterred, however.
“These strikes are part of a much larger effort against worldwide terrorism, one that will be sustained and which is wide-ranging. It will likely be sustained for a period of years, not weeks or months,” he said.

“We will not stop until the terrorist networks are destroyed.”
The military part of the campaign began Sunday during nighttime strikes that hit 30 targets, according to the chief of Britain’s defense staff, Adm. Michael Boyce. Three were in or around Kabul, four were near other heavily populated areas and the rest were in rural locations, he said.
U.S. officials state that the Kabul targets Sunday were at the airport and that bombers helped the Northern Alliance by dropping bombs on Taliban tanks near Mazar-e-Sharif.
Boyce said several other nations, including Italy, Germany, France, Belgium and Australia, had also played a role in the opening day’s attacks. French Defense Minister Alain Richard confirmed that French special forces had joined British and U.S. units conducting reconnaissance and other missions inside Afghanistan.
The Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, said 20 civilians had died in Kabul in Sunday’s strikes. Other officials said three people were killed in the southern city of Kandahar. A Taliban health official later said the Kabul death toll was closer to eight Afghans.
Zaeef added that bin Laden and the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, survived Sunday’s attack. There was no word about their fate during Monday’s fighting.

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