U.S. Says It Controls Airspace, Hints Ground Search for Bin Laden Is Next

Declaring that U.S. forces now control the skies over Afghanistan, Pentagon officials hinted Tuesday that the heavy bombing phase of their campaign may soon be replaced by an intensive ground search for Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network.

On the third day of airstrikes, U.S. officials said the attacks have so badly damaged key Taliban targets that some aircraft returned to their ships without having dropped all their bombs. They also said they had begun the first daylight raids, emboldened by the damage inflicted on Afghanistan’s primitive air defenses.

The attacks continued today with a fresh raid on the southern city of Kandahar at about 7:15 a.m. Afghanistan time, the Taliban said.

Anti-Taliban resistance leaders in Afghanistan complained that the bombing campaign was ineffective, largely sparing Taliban troops.

“We don’t understand what the Americans want. If they really want to destroy the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and other terrorists, they have to bomb according to the coordinates that we give them,” Gen. Bobojan, a senior commander of the Northern Alliance, said at the strategic Bagram air base north of Kabul, the Afghan capital.

Late Tuesday, U.S. jets bombed Taliban front-line positions in Shakardara, said Northern Alliance opposition spokesman Waisaddin Salik, Associated Press reported. The strike in Shakardara, about 12 miles north of Kabul, was the first reported bombing of front-line positions by U.S. forces.

Bobojan and other opposition commanders expressed frustration with the pace of the U.S. assault, which was launched Sunday after the Taliban, the fundamentalist Islamic regime in Afghanistan, refused American demands to turn over Bin Laden and his associates. The Saudi-born Bin Laden is accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and earlier acts of terrorism.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the United States was “moving along well toward our goal” of rooting out Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network.

President Bush, speaking to reporters at the White House during a midafternoon appearance with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, counseled patience.

“If it takes one day, one month, one year or one decade, we’re patient enough, because we understand that the actions we take together are not only important for today, but will say to future chancellors, our future presidents: ‘Here’s how we fight terrorism,’ ” Bush said. “We also understand the actions we take today will make it more likely that our children’s children will be able to grow up in a free world.”

A spokesman for Al Qaeda, Sulaiman abu Ghaith, called on every Muslim worldwide to “uphold his religion” by fighting the United States. Much as Bin Laden had done in a statement broadcast Sunday, Abu Ghaith praised the hijackers who flew airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and said more suicide assaults would follow.

“America must know that the battle will not leave its land until America leaves our land, until it stops supporting Israel, until it stops the blockade against Iraq,” he said in a statement broadcast on Al Jazeera, an Arabic television network in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. “The Americans must know that the storm of airplanes will not stop, and there are thousands of young people who look forward to death like the Americans look forward to living.”

Among other developments:

* A United Nations spokeswoman confirmed the deaths of four Afghan employees of a mine-clearing organization. She said they were killed and four others were wounded when their office near central Kabul was hit during the American-led airstrikes. Rumsfeld suggested that the workers might have been killed by Taliban ground fire.

* In Pakistan, four Taliban supporters were killed in street clashes with police near the southwestern city of Quetta, despite relative calm elsewhere in that country. The airstrikes have deepened an undercurrent of anti-American sentiments in the streets and bazaars of Pakistan’s major cities.

* Police in Ireland detained three Libyans and an Algerian on suspicion of involvement with Bin Laden’s network. No details were available, but the four men were being held under Ireland’s Explosive Substances Act.

Although aspects of the U.S. operation in Afghanistan remain secret and others could not be independently verified, Pentagon officials provided new details Tuesday of the bombing runs carried out so far.

They also said privately that although mop-up strikes are expected to continue at least through today, continuous bombing may soon give way to an aggressive search on the ground for Bin Laden and his associates, coupled with intermittent airstrikes.

American ground forces in the region include elements of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, stationed in Uzbekistan on Afghanistan’s northern border, and an unspecified number of commandos.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that “we were not perfect” in the air raids. Still, he told reporters at the Pentagon, “we did well in our initial strikes.”

“Essentially, we have air supremacy over Afghanistan now,” he said.

He said the 40 U.S. aircraft and 50 cruise missiles used in Sunday’s mission struck 85% of their 31 targets. Myers said bombers were shifting from major targets selected in advance to “emerging targets”--any Taliban tank, convoy or other adversary that might come into view.

The four workers for the Afghan Technical Consultancy, a nongovernmental group assisting the U.N.’s mine-clearing program in Afghanistan, were killed by a bomb or missile, said Stephanie Bunker, spokeswoman for the U.N.’s Coordinating Office for Afghanistan.

Other aid workers in Afghanistan said they were especially upset by the deaths because most of the 15 privately funded mine-clearing groups participating in the U.N. program had provided precise map coordinates of their buildings to U.N. personnel.

“I had the impression at the time that this was just to be on the safe side so our offices would not be targeted,” said Kazim Fazel, director of another mine-clearing group working under the same U.N. umbrella.

Bunker said the locations of the facilities were “shared with relevant authorities higher inside the U.N. All of these offices are known. They were marked.” However, she could not say whether the information was passed on to American military authorities.

The Afghan workers were security guards at a building about half a mile from a broadcast tower that was hit Monday night or Tuesday morning.

Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon that although the United States regrets the deaths, he had not seen evidence that they were caused by errant U.S. bombs or missiles, rather than by Taliban ground fire.

He said that “unintended damage” from the military operation was unavoidable. “If there were an easy, safe way to root terrorist networks out of countries that are harboring them, it would be a blessing,” he said. “But there is not.”

Officials said the first two days of bombing put all but one of five Afghan airfields out of commission, wrecked large air defense installations and badly damaged the Taliban’s communications network. After two days of bombing, “not a lot is left” of the communications system, Myers said.

Aircraft are returning to partially damaged targets to inflict further strikes, he said.

Though Taliban air defenses have been crippled, shoulder-mounted Stinger missiles possessed by some Taliban forces remain a threat, Myers said.

At a news conference in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, Taliban Ambassador Abdul Salam Zaeef said 20 civilians had been killed in the attacks. That could not be independently confirmed. U.S. officials insisted that they had avoided large population centers, focusing their attacks on the outskirts of Kabul, for example.

No U.S. casualties have been reported.

The Pentagon released satellite photos of three targets, including a surface-to-air missile emplacement near Kandahar, the Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan. Post-strike photos of the site appeared to show burning wreckage.

Other satellite photos showed the apparent destruction of a training camp identified by the Pentagon as Garmabak Ghar. A pre-bombing photo showed a collection of low-slung, rectangular buildings on a hillside; in the second photo, not a single wall appeared to remain standing.

Another pair of before-and-after photos showed strikes on the Shindand air base, a remote outpost in west-central Afghanistan that was the second-largest air base used by the Soviets during their 1979-89 occupation. The images showed runways pocked by bomb craters.

Officials said that although the training camp could be rebuilt, the destruction would slow the terrorists’ efforts to learn tactics, technical subjects and the use of weapons.

“All of it adds costs, all of it adds time, all of it puts pressure on them,” Rumsfeld said.

He said that although the bombing could help clear the way for the pursuit of Al Qaeda members, it alone was not likely to destroy much of the network.

He said the bombing is merely the visible part of an anti-terror campaign that also includes law enforcement and diplomatic and financial pressure.

The fruits of this effort “are not going up on a scoreboard at Wrigley Field every day, showing what’s happening,” Rumsfeld said.

Officials also sought to clarify the U.S. attitude toward the anti-Taliban forces fighting in the north.

They said the United States does not want to closely align itself with any of the ethnic groups that want to replace the Taliban regime. At the same time, Rumsfeld said, the administration is encouraging them to overthrow the fundamentalist regime and has not ruled out providing military aid, including air support.

“Let there be no doubt--those elements on the ground, we’re encouraging them,” Rumsfeld said. “We would like to see them succeed.”

Rumsfeld did not address the growing dissatisfaction among Northern Alliance generals, who questioned the scale and wisdom of the U.S. tactics.

The alliance, dominated by the minority Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups, has been fighting to regain control of the government since the Taliban took power in 1996. It controls a forbidding, mountainous region in the northeast corner of the country.

Bobojan, the opposition commander in Bagram, said plans to storm the Taliban front line and push on to Kabul, 22 miles south, will be in jeopardy unless the U.S. steps up its bombing and hits the Taliban positions hard.

The task may be complicated by the fact that in some places the Taliban and Northern Alliance positions are only a few hundred yards apart.

Bobojan’s anger was echoed by other opposition commanders, who expressed disappointment at what they called the feebleness of the airstrikes. Gen. Abdul Basir said the 3,000 men under his command were beginning to grumble.

“I spoke to them and said it’s just the beginning and that America will step up its action and double or triple its destructive impact,” Basir said. “I hope they’ll take heed and take the mood of my men into account and bomb, bomb, bomb. Then, in a matter of weeks the Taliban will crumble and we’ll finish them off.”

Bobojan said the Taliban had a strong concentration of forces north of Kabul, positioned in two formations. According to Northern Alliance intelligence, the main front line consists mainly of Arab and Pakistani forces, regarded as some of the toughest fighters.

The Northern Alliance has stepped up its attacks on Taliban positions since the bombing began, but it is poorly equipped and relying on the U.S. to crush the Taliban, clearing the way for a ground attack by the opposition.

A senior Pentagon official, who asked not to be identified, said that although the United States is offering tactical support to the Northern Alliance, especially around the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, it has a different view of the military situation. He said officials do not want “to get into the position of having to choose among all the groups involved.”

A key part of the Northern Alliance’s strategy has been to persuade Taliban commanders to defect or to foment anti-Taliban rebellions. The opposition claims that 1,200 men, including 40 commanders, have switched sides since the airstrikes began.

There was no confirmation of the claim.

*

Richter reported from Washington and Dixon from northern Afghanistan. Times staff writers Edwin Chen in Washington, Marjorie Miller in London, Tyler Marshall and Rone Tempest in Islamabad, John Daniszewski in Quetta, and Mitchell Landsberg in Los Angeles, and Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.