Attacks inflict 'significant damage,' say British officials

Associated Press WriterLONDON (AP) -- Air attacks caused "significant damage" to terrorist camps and Taliban defenses in Afghanistan, defense officials said Tuesday, but emphasized that it's too early to say that the coalition now controls Afghan airspace.

U.S. warplanes struck targets around Kabul and in northern Afghanistan for a second night Monday, and daylight strikes Tuesday targeted the southern city of Kandahar. British missile-firing submarines participated in the first wave of assaults on Sunday but were not involved in Monday's attacks, said British defense officials, speaking on condition they not be identified.

The assaults are aimed at "degrading" the air defenses of Afghanistan's Taliban regime and "conditioning" the environment for future action, they said. British officials have said the deployment of ground troops in Afghanistan is one option being considered.

The international anti-terror campaign would not end if Osama bin Laden were captured or killed, the defense officials said. The goal of the United States and its allies was to destroy the "tentacles" of bin Laden's al-Qaida organization, which reach into many countries, including European nations, they said.

Officials did not rule out military action beyond Afghanistan, but said much of the work would be done by police and other authorities. Military action formed just one aspect of a "multifaceted" campaign that also has diplomatic, legal and humanitarian fronts, officials said.

Moves to freeze the assets of bin Laden and his associates had already had an effect, they said, without giving details.

"It is going to be a very long, drawn-out campaign not just focused on military action," one official said.

Officials cautioned that the military campaign against Afghanistan would not resemble the 1999 Kosovo campaign, which saw weeks of aerial assaults followed by the large-scale deployment of ground troops. They stressed that the situation was extremely fluid.

"It's not as if there's a master plan that tells us where this all leads to," one official said. "This is completely new."

The U.S.-led airstrikes targeted camps used by bin Laden's al-Qaida network alongside Taliban air defenses, early warning systems and command-and-control centers, the officials said.

Population centers were not targeted, and avoiding civilian casualties remained a "top priority," they said. An official said Britain had received no concrete evidence of civilian casualties, but that they could not be ruled out.

"Technically, sometimes things go wrong," a Ministry of Defense official said.

The United Nations confirmed Tuesday that four Afghan workers for a U.N.-affiliated mine-clearing agency in Kabul were killed in the American air assault, the first confirmed civilian casualties since airstrikes began.

British officials said a detailed assessment of the damage caused by the strikes would take some time and would rely on accounts from Afghan refugees as well as on intelligence information and aerial photographs.

Officials said the multinational alliance led by the United States was strengthening, but cautioned that any future military action must not be allowed to weaken the coalition, which includes several predominantly Muslim countries.

Personnel supplied by this "wider coalition" might play a future role in delivering humanitarian aid to the region, officials said.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Tony Blair met for the first time with his war cabinet of seven senior ministers and Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the chief of the defense staff. Defense Minister Geoff Hoon, in Moscow for a meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Ivanov, was absent.