Afghanistan attack a warning to the neighbours

The Americans have always said that their Army is designed to fight wars on two fronts.

Minutes after the first missiles slammed into Baghdad, the skies of southern Afghanistan filled with the din of American combat helicopters hunting through the mountains for al Qaeda fighters and other armed opponents of the frail US-supported Government of Hamid Karzai.

The US military at Bagram air base, outside Kabul, said that the operation had been planned for several months, and insisted that it was purely coincidental that it began during the opening salvos in the US-British invasion and occupation of Iraq.

But governments rarely tell the truth in times of war. The operation was an attempt by the US to send a signal to their opponents that its armed forces in Afghanistan do not intend to slacken the pressure because of the Iraq war.

It may also have been part of the US's tireless attempts to bracket Saddam Hussein's Iraq with their "war on terror" against Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, authors of the 9/11 atrocities - a link which much of the rest of the world does not accept.

And it will also be an attempt to reassure the Karzai administration, which must now realise that its struggle to build itself into a credible government - always difficult in an ethnically divided society awash with weapons and warlords - will now be harder still.

The start of the war was greeted with anger among the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan, who will have been unmoved by speeches from a parade of American and British leaders - especially Donald Rumsfeld's charge that the Iraqi regime "kills people every day to enforce obedience and discipline", a remark that played into the hands of Muslim leaders who point that it equally applies to Israel.

According to Col Roger King, the US Army spokesman at Bagram, about 1000 troops supported by Apache and Blackhawk helicopters launched a ground and air assault around 6am.

It focused on the Sami Ghar mountains, close to the Pakistani border and 96km east of Kandahar, a former Taleban stronghold. They did so, he said, in response to a "mosaic of different intelligence inputs".

There was, he insisted, no link between this attack and Iraq. "Operations in Afghanistan are conducted completely independent of any operations in other sectors.

"We have done a series of major operations. This is one more in a continuing series." Led by an 800-soldier battalion (part of the 82nd Airborne division which unsubtly calls itself the "White Devils") alongside US Special Forces, they descended on three villages in the Maruf district, reportedly searching hundreds of homes.

The Taleban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, who has been on the run since the ousting of his regime, is said to have family links in the area.

News reports quoted unnamed military sources in Washington saying that the US had detected radio transmissions coming from caves above the villages.

The new American offensive raises the question of whether it was part of a revitalised hunt for Osama bin Laden, possibly based on intelligence extracted from al Qaeda suspects arrested in Pakistan - for example, the organisation's alleged Number Three, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

There have been reports that the CIA and US military have been searching for him a Ribat Qila - where the borders of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan - meet but this is well to the west of the latest offensive.

The run-up to the Iraqi assault saw a surge of media reports about the net closing in on bin Laden which were sparked by Mohammed's arrest. These were deliberately fuelled behind-the-scenes by the American and Pakistani security officials - the famous "unnamed sources" who manipulate the media. Both countries stood to benefit - for different reasons - by advertising their progress in the bin Laden hunt to the outside world. But the Americans have others in Afghanistan in their crosshairs too - the armed men, for example, who fire Chinese-made unguided rockets at their Army (usually without much effect) or at the forces of the interim Government.

- INDEPENDENT