Errant Bomb Hits Housing Row in Kabul

A U.S. bomb intended for a military helicopter in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, crashed into a row of residential buildings a mile away Saturday, while Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network issued new threats against the United States and Britain in retaliation for the week-old air campaign.

The 2,000-pound bomb that missed its target was dropped early Saturday from a Navy F/A-18 fighter. It apparently went astray because of a human error in relaying information on the target’s location, Pentagon officials said.

Reports from the scene indicated that four people were killed and eight injured in the incident, though the officials said they could not confirm the figures.

Meanwhile, in a statement broadcast on the pan-Arab TV network Al Jazeera, an Al Qaeda spokesman repeated earlier threats against American and British civilians, warning “Muslims, children and all those who oppose U.S. policy, not to ride planes or live in high buildings.”

A White House spokeswoman dismissed the threat as “just more propaganda.”

But the broadcast--the third by the Al Qaeda organization since American bombing began a week ago--also was a virtual admission by the terrorist group of responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That undercuts claims by some radical Muslims that the U.S. has failed to prove Bin Laden’s complicity in the carnage.

U.S. planes resumed attacking Kabul on Saturday night, according to reports from the scene. Also, the private, Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press reported attacks on a military base outside Kandahar, the city where the ruling Taliban is headquartered, and on the city of Herat.

The attacks came after U.S. forces had slowed their campaign Friday in observance of the Muslim day of prayer. At the same time, U.S. airdrops of food packets continued in parts of the country.

Bush declared Saturday that the airstrikes against the Taliban and the allied Al Qaeda network had “achieved the goals of the first phase of the campaign.” The strikes began last Sunday in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

The president, in his weekly radio address, said U.S. warplanes now “dominate the skies over Afghanistan, and we will use that dominance to make sure terrorists can no longer freely use Afghanistan as a base of operations.”

But Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader, rejected Bush’s latest call to hand over Bin Laden and called on Muslims elsewhere in the world to join in the fight against the United States.

“Does your faith allow you to remain silent spectators or to support America?” he asked.

Bush, in a televised news conference Thursday night, offered the Taliban a “second chance” to surrender Bin Laden, indicating that would end the bombing.

Omar responded that “America attacked Afghanistan without giving any solid proof [linking Bin Laden to the Sept. 11 attacks] and to cover the failures of its spy agencies. It has attacked Afghanistan to eliminate Islamic countries.”

Powell Gets Ready for Visit to Pakistan, India

Also Saturday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell prepared to leave today for Pakistan and India to discuss the Afghan air campaign, the broader war against terrorism and issues that divide the two South Asian countries.

At the same time, the U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf region got a boost when the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and two other warships--a guided missile cruiser and an oiler--moved through the Suez Canal bound for the Red Sea. Three other carriers already are in the region.

A British official, meanwhile, ruled out a large-scale ground invasion of Afghanistan. Clare Short, Britain’s secretary for international development, told the BBC that there will be “some activity” involving troops on the ground. But she said there is no plan for “swarms and swarms of troops all over Afghanistan.”

The taped message from the Al Qaeda spokesman broadcast Saturday was the third the group has delivered since the airstrikes began.

On the first day of the attacks, the Qatari-based Al Jazeera broadcast a message from Bin Laden, who declared that the world will not see peace until the goals of his group are met. Two days later, a new message from an Al Qaeda spokesman warned of new strikes against the United States and Britain.

In the latter statement, the Al Qaeda spokesman called on Muslims in more than 50 nations to “uphold their religion” by attacking American interests worldwide.

Saturday at the Pentagon, officials said the bomb that hit the Kabul residential area was a sophisticated piece of ordnance called a Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM. First used widely by U.S. forces in the 1999 NATO air war against Yugoslavia, the bomb relies on signals from satellites to guide it to its location--a process that allows it to be used in any kind of weather.

While the targeting is largely automated, the process relies on humans to transfer information from maps. Saturday’s mistake apparently occurred when military personnel transposed figures on the latitude and longitude of the target, defense officials said.

They said there was no failure by the bomb itself or the aircraft that dropped it.

“It went where we wanted it to,” one official said.

During the campaign against Yugoslavia, it was a JDAM that struck the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the capital, killing three people and touching off an outcry in China. In that case, the error occurred because of reliance on an outdated map.

Early last week, a U.S. missile apparently intended for a broadcast tower in Kabul struck the office of a United Nations de-mining agency. The attack was blamed for the deaths of four security guards there.

On Friday, the Taliban claimed that 200 Afghans had been killed when a bomb struck a village outside the city of Jalalabad. But there was no independent confirmation of that figure.

In a briefing Thursday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld sought to quell rising concerns about the military offensive against Afghanistan in the Muslim world and elsewhere by stressing that the United States “does not target civilians.”

At the same time, he conceded that some civilian casualties would be inevitable.

“There’s no question but that when one is engaged militarily [there is] going to be unintended loss of life,” Rumsfeld said.

Strikes Have Weakened Taliban, Bush Says

Bush, in his radio address Saturday, delivered an upbeat report on the status of the military campaign. The airstrikes, he said, have disrupted the terrorist network inside Afghanistan, weakened the Taliban military and “crippled the Taliban’s air defenses.”

He noted that a week earlier, he had said in his radio address that “time was running out” for the Taliban to turn over Bin Laden and his terrorist organization.

“They did not listen, and they are paying a price,” he said.

Bush’s declaration that the bombing had “achieved the goals of the first phase of the campaign” came as military officials have signaled that the effort might shift to a new stage.

With most of Afghanistan’s fixed military targets destroyed, U.S. forces are expected to reduce airstrikes while stepping up use of Special Forces units to try to find Bin Laden, his allies and Taliban troops.

In the first four days of strikes, the U.S. warplanes flew 90 sorties--one-fifth of those flown during the same period in the Yugoslav campaign and one-tenth of the intensity in the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War.

Bush spent Saturday at the presidential retreat in Camp David, Md., the White House said.

Spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise said he conferred by video with the National Security Council. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and CIA Director George J. Tenet were at Camp David.

After the NSC meeting, Bush and Rice worked together on preparations for Bush’s trip to Shanghai, where he will meet next weekend with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, Chinese President Jiang Zemin and other leaders taking part in a meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

Powell’s scheduled trip to Pakistan and India in part reflects growing concern among U.S. officials that a prolonged military offensive in Afghanistan could have the unintended consequence of further straining relations between South Asia’s two biggest powers, both which have nuclear capabilities.

In Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, Powell will try to bolster President Pervez Musharraf, who faces internal dissent over the U.S. airstrikes.

In India, the secretary will try to allay concerns that the U.S. effort to draw Pakistan closer as a key ally in the war on terrorism will sour U.S. relations with New Delhi. Powell will stress that as the world’s largest democracy, India remains vital to long-term U.S. interests.

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Times staff writers James Gerstenzang and Robin Wright contributed to this report.