Come hail, storm or Ramadan

The US military campaign against Afghanistan appears set to escalate in coming weeks, undeterred by winter or Ramadan, Thomas Gorguissian reports from Washington
After a week of intensifying US airstrikes against Taliban positions north of Kabul, the opposition Northern Alliance is reportedly gearing up for a major offensive southward towards the capital.
The airstrikes, which entered their fifth week on Sunday, included the use of B-52 bombers and "carpet bombing."
Describing the bombing, the Pentagon's designated spokesman on military operations in Afghanistan, Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, said that much of the US bombing is designed to soften up the Taliban, "preparing the battlefield" for future action by opposition forces.
Observers still believe that anti-Taliban opposition forces are "loosely aligned" and "ill-equipped" -- not to mention outnumbered by the Taliban. Before the US air campaign began, the Taliban forces were estimated to comprise 40,000 to 45,000 fighters. The Northern Alliance has roughly 15,000 regular troops, although thousands more, according to opposition leaders, could be mobilised and sent to the battlefield.
"We're going to eradicate Al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan and take away the Taliban's ability to support terrorists. There isn't anything that's going to deter us from that mission," Stufflebeem told reporters Monday during a Pentagon press briefing.
The admiral confirmed that a US military team is already in Tajikistan, on Afghanistan's northern border, in order to assess the possibility of using any of three former Soviet military bases and, accordingly, to expand the US bombing campaign and strengthen support for Afghan opposition forces.
"Airfields closer to Afghanistan would give us an advantage in being able to generate sorties," the spokesman told reporters.
At the end of a five-country trip and after meeting with Indian Defence Minister George Fernandez, Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld expressed optimism that the war against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia and Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qa'ida network could be won in a relatively short time. "Do I think that Afghanistan will take years? No, I don't," Rumsfeld said at a press conference. "It is something that is being addressed very aggressively. How long it will take can't be known."
Rumsfeld later told reporters that the number of US Special Forces troops in Afghanistan was more than doubled last weekend. He added that those forces are now operating in more than four locations -- primarily in northern Afghanistan -- and additional troops are expected to join them soon.
US and coalition forces are reportedly continuing their efforts to hamper the Taliban's ability to carry out combat operations in winter. "We're going to fight right through the winter," Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Meyers said. He also suggested that the harsh Afghan winter could work to the advantage of the United States and its allies in the region.
"We are resupplying the opposition with ammunition, with food, with blankets, and we hope in the not-too-distant future with cold weather gear," Meyers said. "The fighting forces on the side of the opposition, on our side, will be much better prepared for winter than the Taliban," Meyers said. He insisted that the war is "going exactly according to our plan."
American public support for the US-led military action "Enduring Freedom" remains high. According to a CNN/USA Today poll conducted during 2-4 November, 71 per cent of Americans "strongly approved of the campaign," 15 per cent moderately approved and 11 per cent disapproved. Only 27 per cent of the people surveyed were very satisfied with the progress of the military campaign in Afghanistan, 52 per cent were somewhat satisfied and 18 per cent were not satisfied.
Some observers and commentators who belong to the "hawkish camp," like Robert Kagan and William Kristol, expressed their satisfaction with the administration's latest war decisions. "The good news is that the administration appears now to be pivoting away from the State Department's flawed approach toward Rumsfeld's more aggressive military strategy," they wrote in the Weekly Standard.
Kagan and Kristol highlighted comments by senior administration officials carried in the Washington Post that they are now "giving wider latitude to the Defence Department to accelerate the US battle plans."
The new strategy, wrote Kagan and Kristol, is "Let's do what we need to do. Let's get on with it and get it over with."
General Tommy Franks, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, said on ABC's This Week that "great progress" was being made in the war effort "because we're doing our work on our timeline. We're doing our work on the basis of our initiative, an initiative which we have and we intend to keep."
General Franks said in the interview that the US objective in Afghanistan was not the occupation of key strategic points or other territory, but the application of constant pressure on the Taliban and the Al-Qa'ida network.
"If we think what this campaign is all about, that being the destruction of a terrorist network inside Afghanistan and the support architecture around it, which is provided by this abusive government of the Taliban, then what I think you see is that we want to keep pressure on this all the time," Franks said.
When ABC asked Franks about calls by some Muslim leaders, including Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf, for the United States to halt its military operations during the holy month of Ramadan, Franks said, "We'd be awfully foolish to not listen to people who have joined with us in this campaign" and after considering their views, "we'll make a decision on whether to move ahead or not."
But the cautious note struck by the general was little in evidence elsewhere. On Monday, a statement was broadcast on Voice Of America, in 53 languages including the main Afghan ones saying, "The coalition has no choice but to go to the source of the terrorism in Afghanistan and to root out terrorist groups elsewhere... As President Bush put it, 'the enemy won't rest during Ramadan, and neither will we.'"
Franks did not rule out sending a large number of US ground troops to Afghanistan and added, "I think at this point we'd be foolish to take anything off the table."
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