Taliban air defenses hard hit

WASHINGTON -- The U.S.-led assault on Afghanistan has rained bombs and missiles on the meager military forces of the Taliban, disabling all but one of their air bases, blinding their air defenses and pounding a pocket of ground troops and several suspected terrorist training camps, officials said Tuesday.

The targets -- 31 struck on Sunday, 13 on Monday -- reflect several priorities for the Bush administration. The strategy is to cripple the Taliban militarily and provide an opening for opposition forces, while weakening Taliban air defenses to the point where allied pilots can roam the skies without fear.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld described it Tuesday, as a third day of strikes began, as creating conditions necessary to wage a lengthy and unrelenting campaign to "root out terrorists." It also will enable the United States to continue providing emergency food aid to displaced Afghans.

Nearly all targets of immediate urgency, such as surface-to-air missile sites that threaten allied pilots, were struck Sunday -- some were struck again Monday -- and by Tuesday air mission planners were moving on to what Rumsfeld called "emerging targets." By that he meant any target of value that popped into view, whether it be an al-Qaida terrorist leader or a Taliban troop convoy.

It was this shift in approach from tightly scripted missions to a more improvised effort that explained why some Navy strike aircraft returned to their carrier in the Arabian Sea on Tuesday with their bombs still attached, Rumsfeld said. Some planes went looking for "targets of opportunity" but found none.

Seventeen of Sunday's 31 targets were Taliban air defenses -- early warning radars and surface-to-air missile launchers -- and U.S. officials said they had been rendered largely ineffective.

"Essentially we have air supremacy over Afghanistan now," Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a joint news conference with Rumsfeld. He said 85 percent of Sunday's targets were damaged or destroyed, but he had no such assessment for subsequent strikes.

An unknown number of Stinger shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles likely remain, Myers said, but the overall threat from Taliban air defenses was so low that allied pilots began flying daylight missions.

The Pentagon released satellite photos of three targets, including a surface-to-air missile emplacement near Kandahar, the southern Afghan city that is the seat of the ruling Islamic Taliban militia. Pre- and post-strike photos of the site offered little detail but appeared to show burning wreckage.

Other satellite photos showed the apparent destruction of a training camp identified by the Pentagon as Garmabak Ghar and a strike on 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 war.

Myers said the camp was largely empty but was hit anyway to deny al-Qaida the opportunity to use its firing ranges and other facilities for training terrorists. He likened it to destroying the Marine Corps Base at Quantico, Va., the focal point of the Marine Corps' military education and training.

The Pentagon indicated it struck about a half-dozen aircraft at Shindand, although Rumsfeld said the Taliban still had an unspecified number of airplanes and helicopters at its disposal. There have been no reports or attempts by Taliban pilots to engage allied planes in air-to-air battles.

Air strikes also targeted the compound of Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar outside Kandahar. He reportedly left the compound minutes before missiles struck it Sunday. It was attacked again Tuesday.

Rumsfeld said a concentration of Taliban troops numbering in the hundreds was attacked near Mazar-e-Sharif in northern Afghanistan in an area where the Taliban is battling forces of the opposition northern alliance.

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