Word: rumsfeld
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...served him well in his race against Al Gore, as Bush said over and over that the secret to making government work was putting together a great team and then demanding results. That's a sensible approach when you have White House veterans like Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld to delegate to; but as Bush is learning now, it's not so great when...
...says an Air Force commander. "But you usually don't get lucky, so you just keep pressing on." Pentagon officials have said some ground operations aimed at crushing the Taliban and al-Qaeda may not get under way until next spring. "We're not setting timetables," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday. In a remarkable admission, Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem said, "I am a bit surprised at how doggedly they're hanging onto power. We definitely need to have patience," he added. "This is going to be a long, long campaign...
...Pentagon's most optimistic estimate is that 85% of American bombs and missiles have hit their targets. But that means that 450 or more may have gone astray, regularly nailing civilian structures and residential neighborhoods. The military has struggled to explain some of its mistakes. Rumsfeld flatly denied a Taliban report that a U.S. warhead landed on a hospital in Herat. But the next day he sent his spokeswoman out to concede that "it is possible" a 1,000-lb. bomb from a U.S. F-18 accidentally damaged the hospital. The U.S. has also acknowledged dropping two 500-pounders...
...Rumsfeld has pledged "to do everything humanly possible...to let the world know that this is not against the Afghan people," but he has little chance of winning that argument. Many rural Afghans will believe anything the Taliban tells them about the U.S.--including last week's accusation that American planes were dropping chemical weapons. The only way for the U.S. to counter such claims may be to slow the aerial campaign and avoid borderline targets altogether. The U.S. destroys about 1% of an enemy force for each day of bombing; by that yardstick, there remain many Taliban targets...
...Taliban country, to prove to the regime that the U.S. is willing and able to cut them down. Facing off against the Taliban on its turf won't be easy, and the human toll could be horrific. But that's the point in a merciless war. Last week Rumsfeld acknowledged as much when he defended the military's use of flesh-shredding cluster bombs on Taliban trenches. "They are being used on front-line al-Qaeda and Taliban troops," he explained, "to try to kill them." Americans rarely hear so blunt a sales pitch. From here on in, they...