Whispers of Vietnam haunt US war on terror - 9/11

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 17:36:57 GMT

WASHINGTON - President George W Bush's six-week-old war against terrorism, launched hurriedly after the September 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, appears to be foundering on multiple fronts. CNN still carries the slogan America Strikes Back on its Headline News Channel but Washington now seems much more preoccupied with biological warfare - in the form of letter-borne anthrax spores - at home than it is with the war against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The war there is not going particularly well, according to virtually all accounts. While the head of the US armed forces bragged 10 days ago that a week of bombing had eviscerated the combat capacity of the Taliban, his operations director admitted this week that the military was surprised at their tenacity. Others, including Afghanistan experts and leaders of the Northern Alliance, which is allied with Washington in its campaign, say that if anything, the regime probably has gained confidence since US warplanes launched their campaign three weeks ago. Even before the bombing began, senior US officials predicted that Taliban commanders would defect once they were exposed to Washington's military might as well as US intelligence agents bearing promises of power and money. This was to have led to the regime's collapse, if not by the end of October, then by the onset of Ramadan in mid-November. There have been no defections over the past three weeks. This is a major reason why the Northern Alliance has not been able to capture Mazar-i-Sharif, the strategic northern city that US war planners had thought would fall in the operation's early days.