- A US Air Force cargo plane crashed in
Afghanistan, injuring eight members of its crew in a sharp reminder of
the risks involved in the ongoing campaign to eliminate the al-Qaeda terror
network.
The crash came as Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday dropped
the strongest hint yet that Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, rather than
Iran or North Korea, could be Washington's next target in the "war
on terror".
In Pakistan, police sources said British-born Islamic militant Sheikh Omar
had confessed under interrogation to kidnapping US journalist Daniel Pearl
but the reporter's whereabouts remained unknown.
The US military said the cargo plane which crashed came down in a remote
part of Afghanistan in the early hours of Wednesday. All the crew survived
and those injured were not critical. The cause of the crash was unknown
but early indications ruled out hostile fire, the military said.
The crashed plane was an MC-130P, a carrier commonly used for special operations.
It was the eighth air crash for US forces in Afghanistan since the military
campaign began on October 7.
The crashes have claimed 11 American lives so far.
Secretary of State Colin Powell made it clear that US leaders were looking
at ways to topple Saddam Hussein and pointedly did not rule out the possibility
of a military confrontation with the Iraqi regime.
While defending President George W. Bush's description of Iran, Iraq and
North Korea as "an axis of evil" Powell said Iraq was a source
of greater concern than the other two states.
"With respect to Iran and with respect to North Korea, there is no
plan to start a war with these nations," Powell told the Senate Budget
Committee on Tuesday. "We want to see a dialogue."
Powell's fine-tuning of Bush's stance follows criticism from some European
leaders of the direction in which Washington's anti-terror campaign is
developing.
The European Union has distanced itself from Washington's attacks on Iran
in particular, arguing that they play into the hands of anti-western hardliners
in Tehran.
The US accuses the three "rogue" states of a mixture of crimes
including supporting terrorism, weapons proliferation and attempting to
acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi on Tuesday accused Washington of
adopting a "unilateral and militarist approach" which would undermine
concerted international action against terrorism.
"We will all be losers if this trend is not reversed," Kharazi
said.
The activity of US forces in Afghanistan is centred on attempts to hunt
down what remains of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and the Taliban
regime that allowed it to make Afghanistan its base.
Both bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar remain at large,
their exact whereabouts a mystery.
Hopes bin Laden had been killed were raised last week when an unusually
tall man was among several victims of a CIA missile strike in eastern Afghanistan.
Locals have since claimed that the tall man was a local tribal elder --
not the 6' 5" bin Laden.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the US military was investigating
the allegations that innocent villagers were killed.
Britain's Guardian newspaper on Wednesday reported that dozens of Taliban
and al-Qaeda fighters had been spirited out of Afghanistan on traditional
drug smuggling routes through Pakistan to Iran and beyond.
Information garnered from prisoners already detained led to a warning from
the Federal Bureau of Investigation earlier this week that a Yemeni national
may have been planning a fresh terrorist strike on the US or US interests
abroad, possibly on Tuesday.
The alert was the latest in a series from the FBI since the September 11
attacks on the United States that left around 3,000 people dead.
An Afghan official said Wednesday that some members of the ousted Taliban
regime had been in contact with authorities in Kandahar to discuss a possible
surrender.
The highest-ranking Taliban official to have surrendered to US forces so
far is former foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil, who presented himself
at the US base in Kandahar last week. It is not known if his questioning
has yielded any valuable information.
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