Washington, Afghanistan | Tuesday
DENOUNCING Taliban leaders as ”accomplished liars,” US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that US forces struck tunnelled-out caves, not a village, in an attack last week that caused massive secondary explosions.
The Taliban claimed that more than 200 civilians were killed in the attack on the village of Kadam in eastern Afghanistan, and on Sunday took reporters for international news organisations to tour the ruins.
The targets of the attack were tunnelled-out caves, said General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs Staff, adding that at least two caves were penetrated by US precision guided munitions that sparked explosions that burned for nearly four hours.
Exactly what was inside the caves was still under speculation, Myers told reporters at a joint press conference with Rumsfeld.
”They were not cooking cookies inside those bunkers,” said Rumsfeld.
”I mean, let’s face it,” he said. ”You do not spend that kind of money and dig that far in and store that many weapons and munitions that it would cause that kind of sustained secondary explosions, unless you have very serious purposes for doing it. The people in the vicinity clearly were connected to those activities.”
The village displayed no bomb craters, and US photo reconnaissance showed the village was not densely occupied, if at all, at the time of the strike, Myers said.
Meanwhile, US warplanes pounded targets in Afghanistan yesterday in what was said to be the heaviest day of bombing since the air campaign began nine days ago.
The Washington Post reports that the Americans also began using the formidable AC-130 gunship, thought to be one of the most devastating weapons in the US’s arsenal.
The AC-130 is thought to have targeted Taliban positions around Kandahar.
The newspaper said while the aircraft was slow moving, it could lay down ”a withering carpet of fire’ from a 150mm howitzer and Gatling gun capable of firing 1 800 rounds a minute.
Rumsfeld said US forces have been going after munitions dumps and acknowledged that people nearby may have been affected. But he said the sites were at isolated locations and presumably anyone in the vicinity was complicit in the military activities targeted.
He said, however, that there have been some unintended civilian casualties, including four people killed by a stray satellite-guided bomb that hit a house in Kabul rather than its intended target, a military helicopter at the airport about a kilometre away.
But referring to Taliban claims of much higher civilian casualties, Rumsfeld said, ”Indeed, some numbers are ridiculous.”
”We know of certain knowledge that Taliban leaders are accomplished liars, that they go on television and they say things that are absolutely not true,” he said.
The air strikes have sparked anti-American protests in neighbouring Pakistan and brought criticism from US friends in the Arab world.
UN Secretary General, and recent Nobel peace prize winner Kofi Annan called on Monday on all parties to the conflict to take all possible precautions to protect the lives of civilians.
Rumsfeld said the protests in Pakistan were not new nor was their size startling, but the United States needed to do a better job of convincing the world that its campaign was against terrorism and not Islam or Afghanistan.
”We have to do a better job,” he said. ”Our cause is just. What we are doing is right. We have absolutely nothing to hide.” – Sapa-AFP, DMG reporter