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U.S. Attacks Taliban Frontline, Rejects Bin Laden Trial Offer
KABUL, Oct 14 (News Agencies) - U.S. warplanes pounded Taliban frontline targets Sunday as President George W. Bush rejected the ruling Afghan militia's conditional offer to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial in a neutral country.
With the U.S.-led military onslaught in Afghanistan entering its second week, the latest air strikes focused on troop positions along the Taliban frontline with opposition Northern Alliance forces.
Planes dropped at least three bombs on a Taliban army division and other military installations near Bagram, 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of Kabul, the Afghan Islamic Press said.
The Pakistan-based agency also reported air strikes on the airport and an army base in the Taliban southern stronghold of Kandahar.
The attacks were significant given recent Northern Alliance indications that the opposition was not prepared to launch a major offensive unless U.S. forces softened up Taliban positions first.
In Washington, Bush said there would be no negotiation with the Taliban after the militia said it might be willing to extradite Bin Laden for trial in a country outside U.S. or Taliban influence.
"There's no need to negotiate," Bush said. "If they want us to stop our military operations, they just have to meet my conditions.
"All they've got to do is turn [Bin Laden] over, and his colleagues and the thugs he hides, as well as destroy his camps," he said.
On Sunday, the number three in the Taliban hierarchy, Maulani Abdul Kabir, indicated for the first time that bin Laden could be tried by a non-Islamic court if the U.S. submitted sufficient evidence of his involvement in last month's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
"If proof is provided, a third country could be chosen, which is neither under the influence of the United States, nor the Taliban," Kabir, the governor of Jalalabad, told a group of visiting international journalists.
Earlier in the day, the journalists had visited the devastated village of Kadam in eastern Afghanistan, which the Taliban says was bombed by U.S.-led forces last week.
Angry residents said around 200 of their relatives and neighbors had perished in a misdirected attack.
Abdul Rasool, 40, said his was one of the dozens of homes destroyed. His wife, whose name he did not want to give, and three sons, Satik, six, Turial, 10 and Pardes, 15, were all killed.
Rasool escaped because, as he has done every day of his adult life, he had risen before dawn to attend morning prayers. He was on his way home, at around 5:00 am, when the bomb struck.
"I heard a huge bang and I ran to my house but there was nothing I could do. It was completely destroyed," he said.
"My family, all my animals are dead. I have nothing left. Why has this happened to me?"
The Pentagon has not commented on the incident in Kadam but has confirmed that a 2,000-pound (907-kilogram) bomb aimed at a military helicopter hit a residential area near Kabul airport on Saturday.
Kabul came under renewed bombardment on Sunday evening and the Afghan capital was fast taking on the air of a ghost town as the cumulative effect of seven days and nights of attacks took its toll on a normally stoic people.
"Believe me, whenever there's a raid my children start crying. Last night even I cried with them," said Mohammad Nabi, 41, an auto spare parts salesman in the Qwaee Markaz area of Kabul.
"When women and children scream in the middle of the night, that is terrifying enough in itself."
Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network threatened Sunday a repeat of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"We tell and recommend Muslims not to get on airplanes and not live in towers and high buildings" in the countries which have carried out air strikes against Afghanistan, bin Laden aide Suleiman Abu Ghaith said in a recorded message broadcast by the Qatar-based al-Jazeera television network.
The Taliban claims more than 300 civilians have been killed since the bombings began on October 7th, but the numbers have been virtually impossible to verify given severe restrictions on journalists moving around the country.
Even the villagers interviewed at Kadam were introduced by the Taliban and there was no way of verifying the death toll. But it was clear to the visiting journalists that the village had been decimated.
The reporters were also taken to Jalalabad hospital to see children and elderly Afghans the doctors said had been injured in Kadam.
"We have at least 15 children here who have lost both their parents," said the hospitals' chief administrator Sher Ali Hanfi, who spoke of a shortage of medicine and surgical equipment.
In an interview with NBC television, a Taliban spokesman said Sunday that despite the militia's inability to respond to U.S. air strikes, the "real war" would start when the conflict switches from the air to the ground.
"America is technologically more advanced," spokesman Suhail Shaheen. "We are not equal to America. The real war starts when ground troops enter Afghanistan."
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