WASHINGTON — Originally developed to clear jungle vegetation and create helicopter landing zones in Vietnam, the 15,000-pound "daisy cutter" bomb is not easy to build or use. Each contains more than six tons of aluminum powder slurry. Technicians need six weeks to pour and cure each of the gigantic munitions, which have a shelf life of one year.
With only half a dozen daisy cutters in the entire U.S. arsenal, you know that when one is dropped, it's for good reason--or a sign of frustration.
In Afghanistan, it's frustration, born of the U.S. decision to wage war by proxy.
On Sunday night, the fourth daisy cutter of Operation Enduring Freedom exploded near Tora Bora, the mountain hide-out where Osama bin Laden may be holed up, obliterating everything within a 150-foot radius. The use of so many of the scarce and enormous bombs is just one symptom of the apprehension that has spread to the highest levels of the Defense Department.
Amid a flurry of reports from the front suggesting that Bin Laden's capture may be imminent, administration and defense officials have their fingers crossed, but many are prepared for bad news. They are increasingly pessimistic about the situation on the ground.
Why? Because the war on terrorism has bumped up against a painful fact: The policy decision--made weeks ago--to let Afghans fighters carry the ground war to Al Qaeda instead of having U.S. troops do it has raised the odds of Bin Laden and his closest associates escaping.
At week's end, anti-Taliban commanders and others in the Tora Bora area were claiming that Bin Laden was finally trapped. That may yet prove true, but U.S. officials were not quick to embrace such optimism. They had heard it before.
At a news briefing late in the week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pointedly noted that Tora Bora wasn't the only cave complex under attack.
The United States has been fighting in Afghanistan for 10 weeks and prosecuting what has been called the "leadership interdiction" phase of Enduring Freedom for nearly three weeks.
Now, senior officials admit that as much as they were surprised by the ease with which the Taliban regime fell, they have been equally taken aback by "how difficult it is to trap the rats running out of the ship," as one high-level Defense Department advisor put it.
"We don't have a clue" where Bin Laden is, a senior Pentagon official said in an interview this week.
