Heavy U.S. Bombing of Front-Line Taliban Has the Opposition Cheering

For six hours Friday, at least one B-52 bomber and several smaller fighter jets crisscrossed the skies north of Kabul, attacking the same few target areas again and again.

From the heavy explosions--some from bombs so powerful that the shock waves were felt miles away--it seemed impossible that anything could be left standing within a wide radius of the blasts when the smoke cleared.

But the local commander of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Halozai Ahmed Ali, watched through Russian binoculars, checking the dark clouds erupting from the bombs against his plastic-covered map. And he wasn’t sure much had changed.

“I know that they have been bombing two tanks from yesterday until now, and we don’t know whether they have been destroyed or not,” he said. “I did see that while one antiaircraft gun was firing at a plane, another jet bombed it and made a direct hit. I am 100% sure it was destroyed.”

Figuring out from a distance whether a bombing has been successful--”battle damage assessment” in military jargon--is not an exact science. The surest way to determine whether a tank has been knocked out is to send troops toward it and see if it fires.

But the Northern Alliance says it still hasn’t decided whether U.S. air power has weakened the Taliban’s front lines here enough to clear the way for an offensive to take the capital, Kabul. So the question sits there, as shadowy as a well-camouflaged tank: Are the bombs hitting the right targets?

It has become a routine of recent wars for military officials to claim high success rates as battles are being waged, and then long after the conflict is over, more detailed reports show that weapons weren’t nearly as accurate as originally claimed.

If opposition forces try to advance along the Shomali plain north of Kabul, their main worries will be Taliban tanks, artillery and rocket launchers arrayed in the hills and mountains above.

Three weeks ago, Ali said, an alliance intelligence report said there were about 24 Taliban tanks positioned between Kabul and the front line about 20 miles to the north.

During Friday’s intense bombing, the targets included eight tanks in four locations, Ali said.

By destroying them, the air assault could have knocked out a third of the Taliban’s estimated front-line tank force in less than a day’s work, by Ali’s count. But after two weeks of airstrikes along the Kabul front, the Taliban’s armor is still formidable, the commander said.

“The bombs were aimed at the right targets,” he said. “But we know that these tanks keep going back to the second line, and then tanks come from there up to the front line. So we don’t know how many tanks have been destroyed, or people killed.”

Ali and his men were pleased with several bomb strikes in the area, which they said hit a Taliban ammunition depot, artillery guns and “special forces.”

Like most opposition fighters, Ali had been critical of the U.S. bombing just a few days ago because it seemed weak and infrequent. But Friday, he and his men were overjoyed with what they saw and, even though there were let-ups in the bombing that lasted several hours, Ali said it was understandable because the planes had such a long way to fly from aircraft carriers and ground bases.

Friday’s biggest airstrikes, which Ali called the heaviest yet along the Kabul front, began about 5 a.m., not long after the first call to prayer on the traditional Muslim day of rest, and didn’t stop until 11 a.m.

About 8:30 a.m., a B-52 flew in and unloaded a stream of bombs on Tota Khan, a strategic ridge where Taliban tanks and artillery have a clear shot at the opposition-held Bagram air base and the main road to Kabul.

A B-52 had bombed the same ridge Wednesday. F/A-18 fighter jets also have attacked the ridge repeatedly, but somehow the Taliban forces defending Kabul keep reinforcing it.

An airstrike on the evening of Oct. 25 clearly scored a direct hit on a Taliban tank at the top of the ridge, because it burned intensely for a long time.

Jolt From Bombs Felt Miles Away

U.S. fighters dropped at least four bombs in the same area Friday afternoon. Gray smoke billowed from what appeared to be a disabled tank, farther west along the ridge from where the other tank was destroyed last week.

Just after 10:30 Friday morning, a B-52 dropped two bombs that exploded simultaneously west of the main road to Kabul, near the town of Karabakh. Seconds later, the powerful shock wave was felt about two miles away at Ali’s rooftop observation post.

The bombing near Karabakh ended with a final B-52 strike that created a long row of fire and smoke as a string of about 20 bombs blew up. The massive strikes left a curtain of brown haze that hung like smog over the plain.

Despite the escalating airstrikes along the Taliban’s front line, the regime’s commanders keep moving more equipment and soldiers in to defend their positions against a threatened opposition offensive, Ali and other commanders said.

There have been no claims of large-scale defections from the Taliban ranks north of Kabul for at least two weeks.

The alliance says that battle-hardened Arab and Pakistani veterans, many of them loyal to Osama bin Laden, make up the hard core of the defenses north of Kabul.

“If they were only Afghan Taliban, they would have been defeated many times by now and we would hold everything from the front line to Kabul,” Ali said.

“Osama’s soldiers and the Afghan Taliban under them are only trying to keep control of this area because they know that these places mean life or death to the Taliban.”

After the first, heaviest waves of the Friday morning bombing had passed, Ali had his walkie-talkie tuned to a Taliban frequency. Several of his soldiers gathered around to listen in as an alliance fighter radioed a warning to the enemy.

“Escape from your posts. An airplane is coming to bomb you,” the opposition soldier told the Taliban fighters.

“It doesn’t matter,” a voice came back through the static. “We will tolerate any bombs.”