5.2.5 Are the Taliban and al-Qaida fighters finished?
A pre-recorded videotape of Osama bin Laden released before the beginning of the bombing on October 7, 2001, condemned any attacks against Afghanistan.
Al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite news channel, claimed that these tapes were received shortly before the attack. In this recording bin Laden claimed that the United States would fail in Afghanistan and then collapse, just as the Soviet Union did, and called for a war of Muslims, a Jihad, against the entire non-Muslim world.
At the beginning of March 2002, it became clear that some Taliban and al-Qaida fighters had regrouped in the eastern part of Afghanistan.
This preoccupied the Americans who immediately went on bombing them from 30,000 feet, as usual; they also launched some ground operations, but they were not successful. According to Afghan sources, two or three Americans soldiers died, together with six Afghans, after coming under heavy fire. They heavily bombed the mountain range of Shah-e-cot near Gardez, using some new 2,000 Lb laser-guided "thermobaric" bombs, which provoke suffocating blasts in the caverns where the Taliban and al-Qaida fighters were assumed to be hiding. These bombs are killing people without destroying the structures such as houses or caves, making it easy, afterwards, to count the dead! On March 2, an attack in which at least 1,000 US troops - used for the first time in direct combat whereas before the fighting was made by their Afghan allies alone- and many Northern Alliance Afghan soldiers was launched.
They soon withdrew to Gardez after coming under heavy fire, and suffering some injuries. One US soldier was reported dead together with a few Afghans. The number of Taliban/al-Qaida fighters was not known; their number was variously estimated to be between 500 and 7,000 depending on the source of information. In the north of the country there was also some fighting between rival Afghan tribes, and here too the US "helped" their friends by bombing the opposition.
After six months of war (around mid-March, 2002) some American people are not happy with the results of the war in Afghanistan, and not only the Democrats. A few weeks ago President Bush was claiming victory, and now it looks like the Taliban/al-Qaida are regrouping and still ready to fight, and Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Omar have not been found yet. We are being told that eight senior al-Qaida leaders have been killed, but even the head of the CIA, George Tennet, admitted to the US Congress that al-Qaida has still active cells, loosely linked together, in 59 countries. In clear, this means that even if the top leaders were killed, these national organisations would still be operating and dangerous. Moreover the Arab world has still a negative opinion of the US; they believe that it was wrong for the US to attack Afghanistan.
After all, the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan is now higher that the number of victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist actions on the US (between 2,000 and 8,000 were killed, and about 3,000 died of hunger or cold as they left their home).
The US military leaders are now saying that the war against terrorism in Afghanistan is loosing momentum because the remaining Taliban and al-Qaida members adapt themselves more successfully to the US tactics, than the US militaries are adapting to theirs. These were the words of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers. He added that there is a debate within the Pentagon about whether the US needs to change its priority in Afghanistan, supporting reconstruction instead of continuing with military operations.
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