1
FRIDAY,OCT.12,2001
WORLD
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN = 13B
U.S. attacks send civilians toward Pakistani border
The Associated Press
KABUL, Afghanistan — The first daylight raid on the Afghan capital in the 5-day-old U.S.-led air campaign sent shoppers scattering in panic yesterday, jumping on donkey carts and bicycles to flee heavy explosions.
In the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, a hit on a munitions dump set off a series of deafening blasts — and an exodus of civilians toward the Pakistani border.
U. S. planes returned to the skies over Kabul late last night, and a huge fireball lit up the sky over the eastern part of the city in the direction of a training base of Osama bin Laden's al-
Oaida terror network.
One month after the terror attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Pakistani officials acknowledged for the first time that U.S. planes and personnel were on the ground as part of the American-led campaign against the Taliban and Osama bin Laden and that the United States had been granted use of two key bases.
Huge detonations accompanied by a howling wind could be heard yesterday from the Afghan side of the border in the Pakistani frontier town of Chaman, about 70 miles south of Kandahar.
But the air campaign is so
controversial in Muslim Pakistan that the government publicly denied any American military personnel were in the country. Pakistani officials who confirmed the American presence were careful not to categorize them as military personnel. Pakistan stressed that its territory would not be military ground.
More than 15 U.S. military aircraft, including C-130 transport planes, arrived in the past two days at a Pakistani base at Jacobabad, 300 miles northeast of the port city of Karachi and about 150 miles from the Afghan border, said Pakistani officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Transporting aid to Afghans by land proving problematic
The Associated Press
TEHRAN, Iran — It took a week to cross the border.
The wheat flour first reached Mashhad, the Iranian hub for relief to nearby Afghanistan. Next, a security check — picking up tidbits and rumors from World Food Program contacts across the sealed frontier.
Finally, the U.N. agency searched for Afghan truckers who appeared reliable enough not to steal the precious cargo.
"We did it," said WFP coordinator Marius de Gaay Fortman after 100 tons of flour crossed into Afghanistan on Tuesday, the first food convoy from Iran since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States and the U.S. retaliatory strikes on Afghanistan.
But he quickly turned prag
matic. "It's just a tiny portion to meet a need that's very huge," Fortman said.
The obstacles to distributing aid are equally imposing; borders closed by Iran and Pakistan, most foreign aid workers gone from Taliban-controlled areas, scared Afghans fleeing into the remote hills. The onset of winter — and its relentless cold — is just weeks away, and some key mountain roads could soon be blocked by snow.
"For many Afghanis, it could be a death sentence," said Ray Jordan, relief director for the Irish aid group GOAL in Islamabad, Pakistan.
in a statement from Geneva yesterday, the U.N. refugee commissioner, Rud Lubbers, expressed frustration.
Even before the American bombing this week, conditions in Afghanistan were desperate. Besides more than 20 years of civil conflict, the country is experiencing its worst drought in living memory. There are nearly 3.5 million refugees in the region — about 2 million in Pakistan and up to 1.5 million in Iran, the United Nations says. The number in Pakistan alone is about 10 percent of the Afghan population.
"Unfortunately, we are not
receiving the support — in the
region or internationally — that we need," he said.
Humanitarian groups estimate more than 6 million Afghans could be stranded inside the country without access to adequate food or shelter. At least 275,000 tons of food is needed for the next five months, according to the British aid group Oxfam.
Northern alliance says it is key to winning war
The Associated Press
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan — The head of the Afghan government opposed to the Taliban militia that controls most of the country said yesterday that his small forces remained the key to defeating the Taliban, even as international forces unleashed their military might.
Burhanuddin Rabbani, whom most foreign governments recognize as Afghanistan's legitimate president, also said the U.S.-led airstrikes that began this week had not changed his forces' fundamental strategy in fighting the Taliban.
Rabbani, who is head of the loosely knit Afghan opposition northern alliance, indicated that his government regards psychological and moral pressure as critical to defeating the Taliban.
Anti-Taliban officials have been buoyed by the international airstrikes and have promised that new offensives against the Taliban were in the works.
"We have to point out that the key to carrying out this war, the main key to carrying out this war, is in the hands of the united front of the Islamic State of Afghanistan," as his government is known, Rabbani said at a news conference in the Tajik capital, Dushanbe.
The forces fighting the Taliban are estimated to number no more than 15,000, about a third of the Taliban's apparent military manpower. They have only a few score armored vehicles at their disposal and a small number of heavy artillery pieces.
"We would like to take this moment to appeal to the people who are under control of the enemy to lay down their arms and to come over to our side," Rabbani said.
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