Oct 20 2001 – The United States has confirmed special forces units are operating inside Afghanistan amid further signals from allied leaders that preparations are under way for limited ground operations against the Taliban regime and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.
But US officials said only a small number of elite troops were involved and they were not engaged in combat. They stressed there were no plans at this stage to deploy “large conventional forces”.
The Washington Post reported that “a handful” of military personnel were operating in southern Afghanistan supporting efforts by the Central Intelligence Agency to encourage ethnic Pashtun leaders to break away from the Taliban and join a new alliance which would take control of the country.
The newspaper quoted another official as saying that additional special forces units were likely to be sent in to Afghanistan soon to assist with reconnaissance, target designation for allied aircraft and, “in rare cases,”‘ attacks on enemy positions.
CNN reported a senior US official in Washington as saying a “very limited number” of US troops had been deployed in Afghanistan in recent days “consistent with the changing nature of the operation”
But a Pentagon official told Reuters news agency: “It is at the very, very, very earliest stage.”
The developments came a day after President Bush said that the two-week allied air campaign was “paving the way for friendly troops on the ground” which would intensify the effort to depose the Taliban regime and track down Osama bin Laden and his supporters.
His comments were seen as reinforcing indications that the allies have no immediate plans to deploy the thousands of troops on standby in the region and that anti-Taliban forces within Afghanistan are expected to take the leading role in any ground operations.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in an interview with cable news channel CNN that the goal of the continuing air strikes was to shift the military balance within Afghanistan to enable the Opposition Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban forces to advance on Taliban-held areas.
Mr Rumsfeld dismissed as “false and self-serving” claims by the Taliban leadership that between 600 and 900 civilians had been killed so far by the bombing campaign, which continued early on Friday morning with strikes on Kabul and Kandahar. There was expected to be a pause during the Muslim day of prayer.
In London, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the US-led alliance recognised that “air power alone” would not achieve the objective of the war in Afghanistan.
“We’ve always said there will be a number of phases to this operation and so what is unfolding is exactly what has been planned,” Mr Blair said.
“I don’t want to say any more about the precise nature of our operations, but our objectives remain as they’ve been: to shut down the terrorist network and to remove the Taliban regime, if they are succouring and helping the al-Qaeda terrorist network, which they are doing.
“I believe the next few weeks will be the most testing time but we are on course, on track, to achieve the goals we set out to achieve.”
The London-based Islamic Observation Centre quoted al-Qaeda military chief Abu Hafs a-Masri as saying Afghans would kill any allied troops that entered the country and drag their bodies through the streets, alluding to the ill-fated US special forces operation in Somalia in 1993.
“America will only be certain about its mistaken calculations after its soldiers are dragged in Afghanistan as they were in Somalia,” he said in a message sent from an undisclosed location within Afghanistan.