Telegraph

Kabul marvels at accuracy of air strikes By Marcus Warren in Kabul (Filed: 23/11/2001)

THE US bombing campaign has given the Afghan capital a glimpse of modern warfare in which fearsome firepower is unleashed with lethal accuracy.

Northern Alliance soldiers are seen through the cockpit of a destroyed military plane as they inspect the runway of Kabul airport

Instead of flattening whole districts, the traditional tactic of the Afghan warlord, the cruise missiles and smart bombs attacked the city in more subtle ways.

Whether in the exclusive district of Wazir Akbar Khan, home to Taliban leaders and al-Qa'eda elite, or at such predictable targets as the airport, the damage is spectacular for its precision rather than for its brute force.

Craters left by B52 bombers near the old front line north of the city are big enough to swallow a bus. But inside town most of the strikes were precise.

The bombing of the main towns was almost certainly one of the most accurate ever carried out. Targets that could have been hit in one night's bombing were picked out over several weeks.

Although the Taliban and opponents of the conflict have made much of civilian deaths, all the evidence suggests that the numbers killed were relatively low and largely unavoidable.

The first strike was led by sea-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles which hit al-Qa'eda's terrorist training camps and Taliban command and control centres. They were guided to their pre-programmed targets by the satellite Global Positioning System.

The US smart bombs were a mixture of laser-guided bombs and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs, dropped up to 15 miles from their targets and again guided in using the GPS system.

The increased accuracy of the attacks on the Taliban front lines in the days before their collapse was a direct result of the increased number of US and British special forces on the ground guiding the bombs on to their targets.

Many of the targets, such as the al-Qa'eda camp at Rishqor, were methodically demolished, building by building, vehicle by vehicle, with the bombers apparently returning to finish the job off more than once.

In Kabul, at least, where there were mistakes, the fault appears to lie with the intelligence provided, rather than the bombing's planning or execution. There were no such blunders at Kabul airport. Repairmen in turbans were trying yesterday to resurface the main runway in the four places where the bombs struck.

Nearby, several Taliban MiG fighters lay in pieces on the grass. It was almost impossible to guess how many had been destroyed but it may have been seven.

So accurate were the hits on the Antonov transport planes that only the aircrafts' tails, wings and some of the cockpits were left. Their fuselages had disappeared. The official supervising the runway repair, Farid Ahmad, was impressed by the Americans' work. He said it certainly outclassed the efforts of the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who destroyed much of the city and the airport 10 years ago.

"I have been through the Russians," he said. "I have seen Hekmatyar in action and the Northern Alliance. This is just incredible. The Americans appear to have been 98 per cent accurate.

"Hekmatyar tried for six years to destroy the TV signal on Television Mountain. The Americans managed it straight away."

Television Mountain, home to the city's main TV tower and radar masts, was one of the first sites to be hit by the bombing. But some of the targets were far more modest. Others are still a mystery. Staff at a Halo Trust base in western Kabul were sitting in its picturesque garden on the morning of Oct 17 when a bomb landed on a derelict site across the road.

Like most holes in Afghanistan, the resulting 20ft deep crater is now being used as an open-air latrine. The Halo Trust premises were unscathed but some of the staff are convinced that the bomb had their name on it.

From the air, the mine-clearing charity's heavy duty vehicles outside could have looked like cars belonging to a Taliban unit. The base also had a powerful radio transmitter to communicate with the rest of the country.

"An hour after the bomb we dismantled the radio mast using our bare hands," said Dr Sed Rahman, the base's doctor, standing over the 60ft high pole. "We bent it to the ground. We were afraid it was attracting the bomber."

Confusion over the targets appears to explain the bombing of another mine-clearing base and the killing of four of its staff in the Yakah Toot district. It was next to a network of radio masts.

One of the last bombs dropped on the capital was aimed at the house of Kabul's Taliban police chief, Yunus. It may have been designed to persuade him to flee.

His villa and the adjacent house for his retainers in Wazir Akbar Khan were demolished with two bombs strong enough to ravage the properties but not so powerful as to kill the neighbours.

"I want compensation," said Gholam Hazrat, the owner of the damaged villa next door. "I don't know who to approach. Maybe President Bush will pay."

-- Anonymous, November 23, 2001