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U.S. Will Not Delay Attacks as Pentagon Confirms Civilian Deaths
JABAL SERAJ, Oct 13 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - The Afghan opposition Saturday said it had not reached a deal with the United States to delay an offensive on Kabul, saying its forces could strike within days, as the Pentagon confirmed that one if its precision-guided missiles hit a residential neighborhood in Kabul today, killing civilians.
"There is not such an agreement [to delay strikes]. It is my belief that military considerations will be evaluated independent of the political situation," opposition spokesman Abdullah Abdullah told journalists here in response to questions about whether a deal had been reached with Washington to hold off on an offensive on the Afghan capital to allow time for a political framework for a post-Taliban government to be put in place.
"There hasn't been any pressure, any demands from Washington to delay an offensive," said Abdullah, who is also foreign minister for the opposition Northern Alliance, also known as the United Front.
"Of course it will come, perhaps it is a matter of days.
"We are waiting for the right time to do it, from a military point of view," he said, adding that for the past few days, opposition commanders and forces had been ready to take action.
Abdullah said a few hours ahead of the first night of U.S. air and missile attacks last Sunday that an opposition offensive on Kabul could begin within days.
But 24 hours later he appeared to backtrack, hinting that the anti-Taliban forces wanted U.S. air support before they would launch any operation.
Earlier Saturday an opposition commander criticized Washington for not bombing the Taliban frontlines.
"Pakistan has asked the United States not to bomb the frontline. It does not want the Northern Alliance to go to Kabul," said General Bagbagjan, frontline commander at Bagram, 21 miles (35 kilometers) north of Kabul.
"There is a secret plan between Washington and Pakistan. It's a shame that [U.S. President] George Bush is preventing the Northern Alliance from going to Kabul," he said.
Abdullah agreed Islamabad might be putting pressure on Washington.
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf earlier this week said the alliance should not dominate a post-Taliban government, saying Afghanistan would revert to the anarchy seen during its rule from 1992 to 1996 if it returned to power.
"There might be some influence from Pakistan. President Musharraf mentioned recently that the United Front forces should not take advantage of the situation," Abdullah said, "That does not mean that a phase of the military operation which is necessary will be delayed indefinitely."
Meanwhile, the Pentagon Sunday confirmed for the first time that one if its precision guided-missiles missed its target and landed in a residential area in Kabul killing at least one civilian, wounding at least four others and razing six houses to the ground, MSNBC confirmed.
Earlier this week, Sher Sha Hamdard, an official with the Taliban's Bakhter news agency in the eastern city of Jalalabad told Agence France-Presse (AFP) after his visit to the village, some 24 miles west of Jalalabad, that at least 160 bodies - mostly of women and children - had been pulled from the rubble when a U.S. attack destroyed the neighborhood on Friday.
The veracity of his accounts could not be verified by Western sources, but Hamdard said a television crew had accompanied him from the Arab news station Al-Jazeera on the trip, which included a two-hour hike across difficult mountain terrain.
The Taliban also invited other international television stations to visit the scene, AFP said.
Hamdard said the village was totally destroyed, and a nearby cave system had collapsed, trapping an unknown number of people who were believed to have taken shelter there when the U.S. attack began overnight Wednesday.
In addition, another 400 Afghan civilians were reported dead Wednesday in various Afghan cities.
Taliban government spokesman Maulvi Najeebullah told IslamOnline in Kandahar Thursday, "The U.S. jets pounded the Afghan cities of Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad and Khost on the fourth consecutive day. However, in line with past, these attacks were also much far from the targets."
"The hospitals in these cities have confirmed around 50 deaths in the fresh attacks, an overwhelming majority of which is civilian," he said, adding that "about 100 civilians have been reported injured, most of them in Kabul."
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