Ramadan Won’t Slow U.S. Offensive, Bush Declares

Appealing for patience with the military campaign in Afghanistan, President Bush declared Friday that “this is not an instant gratification war” and said he won’t order the military to hold back during Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting and prayer that begins in about two weeks.

In Afghanistan, four injured members of a Special Forces team were rescued and carried to safety after their helicopter crashed in severe weather, Pentagon officials said Friday evening. The injuries were not life-threatening.

The badly damaged helicopter, one of two in a team sent to rescue an ill soldier, was later destroyed by F-14 Tomcat fighter planes from the carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, the officials said. It is standard procedure to destroy equipment that could be of value to enemy troops.

In the face of setbacks on the battlefield--the latest posed by the weather and by ground fire the Pentagon said blocked the deployment of special operations forces--Bush stressed that the U.S. military is moving ahead with its mission to target the Taliban regime that has sheltered Osama bin Laden.

Despite pressure from the Muslim world, particularly from key ally Pakistan, to stop the fighting during the holiest time of the Islamic calendar, the president said: “The enemy won’t rest during Ramadan and neither will we. We’re going to pursue this war until we achieve our objective.”

Bush’s comments suggest that he is digging in his heels as the early optimism expressed by senior defense officials has given way to acknowledgment that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan is a stubborn foe--and as the U.S. strategy has been criticized as ineffective.

As the military campaign nears the start of its fifth week, U.S. bombers--among them updated models of the B-52s used more than 30 years ago over Vietnam--continued to target Taliban front lines.

As if working his way through a checklist of targets, Bush said the Taliban’s air defenses--struck in the first hours of the combat missions that began Oct. 7--”have been completely demolished.”

“Whatever assets they had . . . have been demolished,” Bush said. “And we’re slowly but surely tightening the net to achieve our objective.

“We’re making it harder for the enemy to communicate. We’re making it harder for the enemy to protect himself. We’re making it harder for the enemy to hide. And we’re going to get him, and them,” Bush told reporters at the end of a meeting with Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo.

“The American people should be satisfied with the progress we’re making on the ground,” Bush said.

But the degree to which the United States is inflicting punishing damage on Taliban forces--and on Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network--is difficult, if not impossible, to assess from afar. Journalists have virtually no independent access to many of the targeted areas in Afghanistan and, more important, Afghanistan is not what the military calls a “target-rich” environment.

Still, said a former senior Pentagon official, there are ammunition supplies, some heavy weapons and headquarters still to be struck.

The former official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that the United States “got off to a slow start.” He predicted that the pace is going to quicken.

‘Limited Political Time’ for U.S.

At the same time, the defense expert said, Pentagon officials are facing increasing pressure from the American public to demonstrate success. “It’s dawning on them they have limited political time,” he said.

The question of how the United States should handle Ramadan, during which observant Muslims do not eat or drink from dawn until dusk, has dogged military planners from the start. Speaking on CNN’s “Larry King Live” last week, Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, said that “one would hope for restraint during the month of Ramadan” because continuing the battle then “would certainly have some negative effects in the Muslim world.”

Bush’s comments appeared to end any debate about the political wisdom of conducting an aggressive military operation during Ramadan out of concern that it would offend the moderate Arab states whose support the United States has been courting.

Seeming to defer to the Pentagon, he said: “We’ll let the military speak to that. They’re in charge of this operation. This is not a political campaign--this is a war.” But, expressing “my own personal attitude,” he made his controlling vote clear: There would be no letup during Ramadan.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters as he flew from Washington to Moscow that the Taliban forces were “substantially weakened, in many cases cloistered away from the people.”

In Afghanistan, the Taliban announced that it had captured two U.S. commandos near the southern town of Spinboldak and sentenced them to death by hanging, according to a reporter for the Daily Janig, the largest Urdu-language paper in Pakistan. The correspondent was in Kandahar, quoting Taliban officials. A Pentagon official said regional military commanders had reported no one missing.

The helicopter accident underscored the risks faced by U.S. troops that are entering the country to carry out commando raids, gather intelligence and assist anti-Taliban forces.

With only limited access to nearby air bases, some helicopters are flying long distances from ships in the Arabian Sea. And winter weather has already begun to set in.

U.S. officials, who do not want the Taliban regime to think that winter will protect them from U.S. strikes, have been boasting that the U.S. military is an “all-weather force.” Yet on Friday, the freezing rain that heralds the approach of winter in Afghanistan halted flights of helicopters carrying additional military advisors into the country.

Strong winds and snow have already begun closing off some portions of the mountainous country.

At a Pentagon briefing Friday, a senior official acknowledged that inclement weather has halted the effort to put additional Special Forces on the ground. The Pentagon has said it is seeking to quickly triple or quadruple the dozens of troops who have been working with anti-Taliban forces as the opposition fighters prepare for an offensive in the northern part of the country.

But Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the effort had been temporarily halted because of the weather. He acknowledged that “there are some conditions that won’t let aircraft fly freely.”

The opposition Northern Alliance said it will send several thousand troops into what it called military maneuvers Sunday near the town of Jabal os Saraj, about 40 miles north of Kabul, the capital.

The exercise is intended to show that the anti-Taliban forces are at their highest state of readiness as commanders prepare to decide whether to launch an offensive on Kabul, alliance Foreign Minister Abdullah said.

But it could also be a ploy aimed at a skeptical foreign audience, as the alliance tries to convince the United States and other countries that it is worthy of large amounts of military and other aid as well as political support.

Alliance commanders along the Kabul front frequently complain that they don’t have sufficient weapons and ammunition to take on the better armed and trained Taliban forces.

An airstrip under construction on a desert plain north of Kabul is designed to handle Russian-built Antonov and American-built C-130 transport planes, according to Abdullah, who insists that the aircraft would be delivering only “humanitarian aid.”

But if, as expected, the runway is completed soon, it would provide an ideal air bridge for the supply of such small weapons and ammunition as artillery shells and rockets, which alliance forces will need if they decide to launch a full-scale assault on Taliban defenses north of Kabul.

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Gerstenzang and Richter reported from Washington and Watson from Jabal os Saraj.