International community in Afghanistan continues ..

Americans used Central Asia as a military base which added a geographic and strategic dimension to the war. Coalition aircrafts flew military missions from the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan from early March 2002. The Manas base at Bishkek airport housed about 3,000 troops, approximately two-thirds of whom were Americans who arrived in April. The others were drawn from some dozen other states.

Even with the sustained international support for the war, and unprecedented American diplomatic and military presence in central and south Asia, many military mistakes and accidents occurred. In a training exercise near Kandahar, an American pilot bombed the Canadian troops, killing four and wounding eight. US gunships mistakenly fired on Afghan wedding celebrations in eastern Afghanistan in May—killing as many as a dozen civilians—when they came to support Australian forces under enemy fire. The Afghan government concluded that US bombings had killed forty-six civilians, including twenty-five in the wedding. The documented high level of civilian casualties -3000-3400 (October-March 2002) civilian deaths–in the US air war upon Afghanistan reflects the apparent intention of the US military strategists to fire missiles into and drop bombs upon, heavily populated areas of Afghanistan.

Some of these unintended casualties were perhaps an indication of the difficulties of waging the war against an elusive enemy. American and allied Afghan forces encountered heavy resistance in early March 2002 at Shar-i-kot in eastern Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda was believed to be recruiting more local support. On 4 March, eight Americans were killed, and forty wounded, in the biggest single incident of American combat casualty. Most were killed when an American Chinook helicopter was shot down, the first time a US war machine was so destroyed.

This suggested that substantial resistance was being mounted in the east of Afghanistan, in what US Central Command described as a ‘fight to the death’ and in which at least 500 enemy forces were believed killed. At the same time, the Pakistani government announced that it would assign additional troops to its 1,500-mile border with Afghanistan, having
already deployed some 60,000.

To be continued...