U.S. attacks Taliban defenses around Kandahar as tribal fighters advance

By KATHY GANNON
Associated Press Writer

KABUL, Afghanistan – Relentless U.S. airstrikes pummeled the defenders of Kandahar Sunday with anti-Taliban forces within 20 miles of the last militia stronghold. A U.S. Marine officer said his troops might join the assault.

In the east, a provincial military official said U.S. warplanes bombed an anti-Taliban headquarters Sunday, killing at least eight people. The claim came a day after the official reported similar bombings killed scores of civilians nearby.

Air Force Lt. Col. Mark Compton, a Central Command spokesman in Tampa, Fla., said U.S. warplanes hit their intended targets around Tora Bora, the cave complex that is a suspected hideout for Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist organization.

"We know targets near Tora Bora south of Jalalabad fall into the realm of al-Qaida and Taliban strongholds. We are sure we are hitting these targets and we can account for all munitions," he said.

"The United States regrets any loss of innocent civilian lives. We will continue, however, to destroy al-Qaida and Taliban leadership and the places they do business," Compton said, claiming any civilian victims had been taken to the site by Taliban or al-Qaida fighters.

In Koenigswinter, Germany, U.N.-led talks on Afghanistan's future took an important step forward Sunday with four Afghan factions debating a draft outline of a proposed administration to rule the country until a permanent, post-Taliban system can be put in place.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S. forces would do "whatever is necessary" to root out the Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists from their cave hide-outs near Kandahar and Jalalabad.

Asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether poison gas would be pumped into the caves, Rumsfeld noted that northern alliance forces used flooding to force the surrender Saturday of the last 82 Taliban holdouts in a prison fortress near Mazar-e-Sharif in the north. Hundreds of their comrades and a CIA operative died in an uprising last week.

"I guess one will do whatever it is necessary to do," Rumsfeld said. "If people will not surrender then they've made their choice."

"The remaining task is a particularly dirty and unpleasant one," Rumsfeld said. "We expect that there will be casualties, we expect that there will be people captured."

At the forward U.S. Marine base in the desert 70 miles southwest of Kandahar, an officer suggested for the first time that American forces might join the final assault on Kandahar.

"You have a lot of forces at play ... the opposition groups coming from the north down, the southeast up and us potentially coming from where we are," said Maj. James "Beau" Higgins, an intelligence officer.

A 11/2-mile-long column of U.S. military vehicles, including light armor, left the base Saturday in a plume of dust. U.S. officials would not say where the vehicles were going.

The Marines had not joined the fight since helicopter gunships attacked a Taliban convoy a week ago. They have been joined by British, German and Australian officers ahead of a possible push on Kandahar.

A U.S. military source said the Taliban were moving in reinforcements, underscoring the vow of supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to fight to the death to hold the birthplace of the movement.

The United States holds bin Laden responsible for the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings that killed thousands in New York and at the Pentagon. President Bush began the military campaign Oct. 7 after the Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden and his supporters.

At the U.N. talks in Germany, a proposed interim council of elders is taking shape that would rule for six months before convening a national conclave to decide on a longer-term government.

But the details of power-sharing remained to be worked out, with the delegates from four Afghan factions under intense international pressure to quickly agree on a new administration.

"They have to agree to every word in this agreement and implement it," U.N. spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said. "The international community will be watching very carefully."

U.S. bombers pounded Taliban defenses Sunday around the Kandahar airport, a few miles southeast of the city, said tribal sources in Pakistan. Along the border, 70 miles to the southwest, journalists saw an increase in the number of high-flying jets headed northward toward the Taliban spiritual capital.

The sources said about 3,000 fighters loyal to former Kandahar governor Gul Agha battled their way to within one mile of the airport. About 4,000 fighters under Hamid Karzai, meanwhile, advanced without resistance to 22 miles north of Kandahar – "a 40-minute drive," according to his Karzai's brother Ahmed in Pakistan.

Ahmed Karzai quoted one commander, Mohammed Shah, as saying the American bombardment was so intense he's "never seen anything like it. It's unbelievable."

All reports of fighting near Kandahar and of anti-Taliban troops advances were impossible to independently confirm because the Taliban bars foreign journalists from areas they control. Anti-Taliban forces tend to exaggerate their claims.

At the Marine base southwest of Kandahar, a military source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Taliban were moving fighters and weapons into Kandahar from Lashkargah, a provincial capital west of the city.

Anti-Taliban fighters north of Kandahar claimed to have captured a Taliban commander Saturday as he brought 25 yards of white cloth into the city. White cloth is traditionally used to wrap corpses for burial.

The tactics employed around Kandahar were similar to those used last month to drive the Taliban from Kabul and most of the rest of the country.

Taliban defenses around Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif and other cities collapsed after days of intense American bombing followed by ground assaults by the northern alliance.

In the south, however, the Americans are depending not on the northern alliance but on ground troops in makeshift units raised by local ethnic Pashtun tribal leaders and warlords from among their clans. The Taliban is primarily Pashtun.

Although some of the commanders fought in the war against the Soviets, others, including Karzai, have little military experience.

"About a week ago ... I thought Kandahar would fall in about a week. Obviously it hasn't," said Higgins, the Marine major at the forward base near Kandahar.

Capt. Stewart Upton, spokesman for the Marines in Afghanistan, would not say what role U.S. forces might play in an assault on Kandahar or give any idea of their mission plans.

With the decisive battle for Kandahar taking shape, about 8,000 Afghans have fled into Pakistan in the past few days, according to Peter Kessler of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

In the capital, Kabul, Russians opened a field hospital Sunday, and officials from both countries declared they had put the bitter war of the 1980s behind them. The Russians are working to open a new embassy, joining a growing diplomatic community including envoys from Iran, India, France and Britain.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Associated Press correspondent Christopher Torchia contributed to this report from Quetta, Pakistan.

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