US warplanes carried out their heaviest raids yet on the Taliban frontline north of Kabul today, but an opposition leader said the attacks were not enough for the launch of a ground offensive.
The Taliban, admitting they were heavily out-gunned, refused to hand over Osama bin Laden even at the cost of "every life in Afghanistan".
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Waves of aircraft roared over the frontline trenches of the Taliban facing the opposition Northern Alliance a few kilometres north of the capital and fired at Taliban targets after a night of heavy bombing of Kabul.
The raids were the biggest on the Taliban front since they began there last Sunday.
Missiles were reported to have hit four Taliban strongholds facing the strategic opposition-held airport of Bagram.
Taliban leaders claimed they were arming villagers to resist US ground attacks. They vowed to fight to the last man.
The Taliban Education Minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, admitted the past eighteen days of air raids had inflicted some damage on some radar, technical instruments and airports.
But he claimed the Taliban were battle-hardened and had great experience of ground warfare in Afghanistan's rugged terrain after fighting the Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1989.
"If American troops entered Afghanistan, they would suffer huge casualties," he warned. "As long as one Muslim Afghan is alive he will not surrender to America."
The Pakistan-based Islamic Afghan Press agency said today that US bombs struck a village in southern Afghanistan, killing 52 people. There was no independent confirmation of the report.
A number of civilians has been killed and wounded since the United States launched its campaign, but Washington has dismissed Taliban claims of more than 1,000 civilian deaths as wildly exaggerated.
The Pentagon admitted yesterday a US aircraft had mistakenly dropped one 1,000-lb bomb near a home for the elderly and two 500-lb bombs in a residential area outside Kabul, lending credence to repeated Taliban accusations that the air war is killing civilians.
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