U.S. Strikes Again

 
WASHINGTON/KABUL (Reuters) – The United States unleashed its first daylight bombing raids on Afghanistan on Tuesday and said it had knocked out almost all airfields there, creating air supremacy for around-the-clock air strikes against radical Islamic forces.
As U.S. bombs and missiles rained down for the third straight day on Afghanistan in reprisal for last month’s attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 5,600 people, authorities appealed for calm in Florida where two cases of anthrax have raised a scare of possible biological warfare attacks.
At a Pentagon briefing, officials for the first time showed pictures of destroyed airfields, missile sites and training camps used by the al Qaeda network of Saudi-militant Osama bin Laden, blamed by Washington for the Sept. 11 attacks that leveled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: “We have struck several terrorist training camps. We have damaged most of the airfields, I believe all but one, as well as their anti-aircraft and launchers … We believe we are now able to carry out strikes more or less around the clock as we wish.”
The FBI said on Tuesday it had not found any evidence so far of criminal intent in its investigation in Florida of two cases of anthrax, a rare disease that could be used as a biological weapon.
Teams of FBI agents have been searching a building belonging to a supermarket tabloid group, American Media Inc., in Boca Raton, Florida, where two workers were exposed to anthrax. One of the workers, a photo editor, died last Friday.
 
GROUND ATTACK POSSIBLE
As the U.S.-led war against terrorism continued from the air, Britain, Washington’s leading ally in the campaign so far, said ground operations were a possibility.
“As far as any ground operations are concerned, clearly we are preparing plans to allow us to look at that as an option,” British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said on Tuesday.
“We have only just started the very first part of the military campaign, with the attacks that took place overnight on Sunday and Monday,” he added.
Prime Minister Tony Blair told the Afghan people in a targeted radio interview on Tuesday that the West would not abandon them after the war on the Taliban had been completed.
In a broadcast for the Pashto language service of the BBC’s World Service, Blair conceded the West had made past mistakes on Afghanistan and had simply “walked away” from its people.
“This time round we must not repeat that mistake,” he said. “This conflict will not be the end…once the conflict is over we’ve then got to sit down with people in Afghanistan and try and work out a stable and coherent way for the future.”
“That is our commitment. We are not going to walk away again,” Blair said.
In Pakistan, police shot dead three people in anti-American demonstrations but widespread protests against the U.S. bombing failed to materialize.
Soldiers were deployed at many intersections in Islamabad and built sandbagged bunkers on the edge of the capital’s “diplomatic compound” that houses western embassies.
The Afghan opposition Northern Alliance said 40 Taliban commanders with 1,200 men under arms had switched sides and closed the only road linking north and south Afghanistan.
 
TALIBAN STRONGHOLD ATTACKED
One of the missiles slammed into a house in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar once used by Mullah Mohammad Omar, the movement’s supreme leader, but he was not there, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan said. Bin Laden has also escaped unscathed from the attacks, he said.
With U.S. warplanes returning home to their bases, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami called for an immediate end to the strikes. “Thousands of people should not be killed under the pretext of fighting terrorism, and innocent and oppressed people should not be sacrificed to aggression,” he said.
Discontent continued to simmer in some Islamic countries. Indonesian police fired warning shots, tear gas and water cannon in a clash with 400 Muslim anti-American protesters near the U.S. embassy in Jakarta.
Leaders of rival Palestinian factions appealed for calm and officials kept schools and universities closed in the Gaza Strip, where two people were killed and more than 100 injured on Monday in clashes between police and bin Laden supporters.
President Bush aimed on Tuesday to reassure a nation concerned about the possibility of reprisal attacks by naming retired Army Gen. Wayne Downing as a new anti-terror chief and to consolidate his coalition in talks with a key European ally German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
 
ANXIETY OVER ANTHRAX SCARE
Attorney General Ashcroft said on Monday he took the reported Florida cases of anthrax, a rare disease often cited as a potential biological warfare agent, very seriously but he could not link them to Islamic extremists.
A 63-year-old Florida man died of anthrax last week. One of his co-workers tested positive for the disease and authorities have sealed off the tabloid newspaper where the two worked.
More than 800 people have rushed to Florida hospitals for anthrax tests.
Northern Virginia health officials said on Tuesday another man was being tested for anthrax, but preliminary results indicated he very likely did not have the disease. Test results would not be known for 24 to 48 hours.
A British minister said that bin Laden’s al Qaeda group had probably acquired chemical and biological weapons.
“We know that the al Qaeda network has been trying to get hold of biological and chemical weapons for the last 10 years. We believe they’ve probably got some,” Foreign Office Minister Ben Bradshaw said.
As more details of the campaign emerged, an officer aboard the USS Carl Vinson said warplanes from the carrier bombed two Afghan MiG fighters on the ground and hit at least one “terrorist” training camp on a second day of raids.
The U.S. naval aircraft, in action throughout Monday and well into the night, encountered more anti-aircraft fire than when the strikes on Afghanistan began on Sunday, but none was hit and all returned safely, the senior officer added.
Just outside Kabul, the extent of the havoc wreaked by the U.S.-led raids was being assessed. Rescue workers dug through the rubble of a U.N.-funded office on Tuesday to recover the remains of four men killed by a missile as they slept. The four worked with the U.N. clearing land mines in Afghanistan.