U.S. Launches Afghan Air Assault

Associated Press
December 9, 2003

BAGRAM, Afghanistan - Hundreds of American soldiers launched an air assault in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, part of a new operation the U.S. military is calling its biggest since the fall of the hardline Taliban regime two years ago.

Soldiers from the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment stormed into an area east of Khost, a restive town along the border with Pakistan that has seen several recent attacks on coalition personnel, said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a U.S. military spokesman.

"We came in with helicopters," he said of the maneuver, part of the newly launched Operation Avalanche. "We're trying to interdict along the border."

U.S. and Afghan officials have long charged that Taliban rebels and their al-Qaida allies flee back across the mountainous border into Pakistan after launching attacks.

Hilferty gave no further details, including whether there were any U.S. casualties.

Operation Avalanche, which Hilferty said began Dec. 2, involves some 2,000 soldiers in four battalions and is being billed as the largest undertaken since the Afghan war that ousted the Taliban ended in late 2001.

Hilferty said the operation was designed to root out insurgents before the brutally cold winter months.

"We're trying to get them before the winter sets in," he said.

Hilferty also issued the military's bluntest-yet acknowledgment that it was responsible for a blundered air assault on Saturday that killed nine children as they were playing in a field in Hutala village, 100 miles southwest of the capital.

"We admit that we were responsible," he said. Hilferty added that the military could still not confirm whether it had killed the intended target, a Taliban official named Mullah Wazir.

Villagers say the dead man was Abdul Hamid, a laborer in his 20s who had returned from Iran just days before his death, and that Mullah Wazir cleared out days before. DNA tests are ongoing, Hilferty said.

The spokesman said the military has received "specific intelligence" that insurgents might try to target the loya jirga, or grand council, which begins in the capital on Saturday to ratify a new Afghan constitution. He gave no specifics, but cited a recent bicycle bomb attack in Kandahar and the bombing last month of Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel.

A wave of Taliban attacks against aid workers, U.S. soldiers and Afghan government officials has belied American claims that the military is winning the war to stabilize the country. Two years after the fall of the Taliban, some 11,700 soldiers - mainly Americans - remain in Afghanistan on combat missions against the Taliban and their allies, remnants of al-Qaida and followers of renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

On Monday, one Pakistani engineer was shot dead and his Afghan driver was wounded when gunmen attacked their vehicle on the main Kabul-Kandahar highway in Ghazni province. A second Pakistani engineer was missing, and two escaped. Last month, a French U.N. worker was shot dead in the province by suspected Taliban militants.

Hilferty said the attacks were not a sign that Afghanistan wasn't on the road to recovery, pointing to the return of millions of refugees and the forthcoming constitutional council.

"The measure of success is not that they killed a U.N. worker last month," he said.