Problem of 'collateral damage' adds to Bush's bad week

The man from the Pentagon was polite enough but you would not have described him as being particularly enlightening.

"We have no information on that. We are not speculating at this time," he said, when asked about the reports of more than a dozen civilians being unintentionally killed during the US airstrikes in Afghanistan yesterday morning. "Perhaps there will be additional information at the briefing tomorrow."

Well, what about the reports of those civilians being unintentionally killed during the strikes on Saturday? "I have no information to confirm that," the spokesman countered. "Perhaps tomorrow."

The reports of civilian casualties from US strikes were always going to play badly – particularly in the Muslim world – but if you are going to support a campaign of aerial bombardment you are supporting a campaign that has a high risk of resulting in innocent civilian deaths.

For the past three weeks, the US has revealed its ability to bomb targets inside Afghanistan around the clock – day or night makes no difference. They might not always hit the correct targets with those bombs, but they can certainly drop them.

They have also revealed their inability to answer questions about such bombing raids outside of normal working hours, Monday to Friday. Even if seven Afghan children have just been blown up by the US as they sat eating their breakfasts.

Perhaps there is a reason for this. These latest revelations about "collateral damage" came at the end of a somewhat troubling week for US President George Bush. After the first two weeks of a bombing campaign which seemed to carry with it the support of the entire nation, questions were starting to be asked last week about where things were going.

Afghan warlord Abdul Haq was captured and executed by the Taliban on Friday, after vainly pleading for more help from the allies. His supporters said that the US had wasted an opportunity to use Mr Haq to bring the campaign to a speedier end.

But it had already become apparent that the White House had become distracted by the gathering anthrax hysteria.

It seemed as though the administration's thoughts were not entirely on the job of dealing with those "evildoers".

At a photo session with members of Congress last Wednesday, a somewhat testy Mr Bush was forced on to the back foot when questioned about the detection of spores in a White House mail facility. "I don't have anthrax," he said.

While Mr Bush was worrying about his spores, others were starting to worry about the bombing campaign and just where it was going. Why were civilians being killed while Osama bin Laden was still at large?

After all the gung-ho talk of locating Mr bin Laden and "bringing him to justice", why was the administration forced to admit it still had no idea where he was? Were things stalling? Even Rear Admiral, John Stufflebeem, the deputy operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was forced to admit of the Taliban: "I am a bit surprised at how doggedly they're hanging on to their to power."

There were rumblings on Capitol Hill as well. Echoing a comment by the Pakistani leader, General Pervez Musharraf, who said he hoped the bombings raids would soon be completed, Senator Joseph Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned: "The longer the bombing goes on, the more susceptible we are to criticism, justified and unjustified, in the Islamic world."

The Bush administration was again having to defend the course the military campaign was taking yesterday. The Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, a man who can spin with the best of them, contended that the operation was "not a quagmire.

"It is going very much as expected. It is going very much as predicted," he said. "From day one, the President has said, and I have said repeatedly, that this will be a long, long effort." Unfortunately, on the matter of those seven dead children, the Secretary of Defense had no information to offer. Perhaps tomorrow.