US pounds Taliban; anthrax turns up at Pentagon

Washington/Kabul, Nov 5: The United States aircrafts maintained their relentless assault on Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban on Monday as traces of anthrax showed up at the Pentagon, one of the targets of the September 11 hijack attacks on the US that plunged the world into crisis.

With the military onslaught on Afghanistan in its fifth week, the US warplanes returned to blast targets around the capital Kabul and on Taliban front lines to the North. The Taliban said that the war would be long and the US forces would face defeat once they moved the conflict from the air to the ground.

Rockets fired from the US aircraft struck a hotel and vehicle used by Taliban fighters in Kabul, littering the street with wreckage and body parts. The sound of helicopters was heard before the rockets slammed into the hotel just before dawn. That would mark a change in the US tactics from using high-flying jets in the campaign to oust the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban, who are protecting Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the September 11 killing of about 4,800 people in New York and Washington.

The US warplanes pounded Taliban lines North of the Afghan capital as well as key cities in the South and West, the Pakistani-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) agency reported.

On the US home front, the Pentagon joined the White House, CIA, Congress, Supreme Court and other government buildings where mail facilities and offices have been contaminated with anthrax.

Traces of the germ warfare weapon were found at a Pentagon post office, but the facility was de-contaminated over the weekend and no further signs of the potentially deadly spores were found, a spokesman said.

The deadly agent has infected at least 17 Americans, killing four of them, and contaminated a growing number of the government and media buildings as well as mail facilities in several states.

Pentagon spokesman Glenn Flood said that the two positive samples were among 17 samples taken at the post office on October 30 and were located in two post office boxes, one unassigned and one rented by a Navy service member.

In Afghanistan, Taliban leaders continued to express defiance in the face of a US air assault that shows no sign of slackening, even as winter and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan approach. The US has put a small number of elite special forces on the ground and is arming opposition groups to take on the Taliban. But it has made no preparations to send large numbers of its own ground troops into the country, where they could get sucked into a quagmire. “We are preparing for a long war,” education minister and top spokesman Amir Khan Muttaqi said, adding that the US was too soft to take on the Taliban at close quarters.

“If they have the strength and if their soldiers are not men used to a soft life, why are they not fighting face-to-face?” he said. “This power that the world calls a mighty force will face fiasco. Once again we advise the people of America and its government that they still have time to give up their insane action,” he said.

“They need to consult the Russians and the British about their defeats here,” Mr Muttaqi added, referring to the Afghan massacre of British colonial troops in the 19th Century and the humiliation of the Soviet army in their 1979-98 occupation.

Pakistan, a key US ally, filed an accusation of sedition against an Islamic cleric for stirring revolt against the military government because of its support for the 29-day-old US bombing. The US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed speculation that the campaign could drag on for years.

— Reuters