U.S. Launches Afghan Assault

Hundreds of American soldiers launched an air assault in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, part of a new operation the U.S. military is calling its biggest since the fall of the hardline Taliban regime two years ago.

Soldiers from the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment stormed into an area east of Khost, a restive town along the border with Pakistan that has seen several recent attacks on coalition personnel, said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a U.S. military spokesman.

"We came in with helicopters," he said of the maneuver, part of the newly launched Operation Avalanche. "We're trying to interdict along the border."

U.S. and Afghan officials have long charged that Taliban rebels and their al Qaeda allies flee back across the mountainous border into Pakistan after launching attacks.

Hilferty gave no further details, including whether there were any U.S. casualties.

Operation Avalanche, which Hilferty said began Dec. 2, involves some 2,000 soldiers in four battalions, and is being billed as the largest undertaken since the Afghan war that ousted the Taliban ended in late 2001.

Hilferty said the operation was designed to root out insurgents before the brutally cold winter months.

"We're trying to get them before the winter sets in," he said.

The 501st, based in Fort Richardson, Alaska, was on its first major deployment since arriving about two months ago.

"They are well-suited to working with the 10th Mountain Division here in the high mountains of Afghanistan," Hilferty said.

Hilferty also issued the military's bluntest-yet acknowledgment that it was responsible for a blundered air assault on Saturday that killed nine children as they were playing in a field in Hutala village, 100 miles southwest of the capital.

"We admit that we were responsible," he said.

Asked about a report that civilians also had been killed in a U.S. operation in Paktia province, Hilferty he said the military was investigating "unspecified casualties" in that area.

The military could still not confirm whether it had killed the intended target in Saturday's raid: a Taliban official named Mullah Wazir.

In Kabul, the capital, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad said Afghan and Americans were still investigating the incident. "They have a clear sense of urgency in their work," he said.

"While coalition forces are confident their aircraft struck their aim point, we cannot yet 100 percent confirm that Wazir was killed at the site."

Khalilzad had announced Sunday that Wazir was dead, but said that certainty was based on faulty intelligence.

Villagers said the dead man was Abdul Hamid, a laborer in his 20s who had returned from Iran just days before his death, and that Mullah Wazir cleared out days before. DNA tests are ongoing, Hilferty said.

The spokesman said the military has received "specific" intelligence that insurgents might try to target Afghanistan's loya jirga, or grand council. It begins in the capital on Saturday to ratify a new Afghan constitution. He gave no specifics, but cited a recent bicycle bomb attack in Kandahar, and repeated rocket attacks.

A wave of Taliban attacks against aid workers, U.S. soldiers and Afghan government officials has belied American claims that the military is winning the war to stabilize the country. Two years after the fall of the Taliban, some 11,700 soldiers — mainly Americans — remain in Afghanistan on combat missions against the Taliban and their allies, remnants of al Qaeda and followers of renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

On Monday, one Pakistani engineer was shot dead and his Afghan driver was wounded when gunmen attacked their vehicle on the main Kabul-Kandahar highway in Ghazni province. Last month, a French U.N. worker was shot dead in the province by suspected Taliban militants.