Air campaign against Afghanistan intensifies

A U.S. special-forces gunship swung into action today, raking a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan with heavy machine gun and cannon fire.

Fierce daylight bombing at Kabul set two International Red Cross warehouses afire, the Associated Press reported. Massive explosions from the battle over Kabul's skies could be heard along the front lines between Taliban and Afghan opposition forces 30 miles to the north.

The second straight day of fierce daylight raids and the first use of the low-flying, lumbering AC-130 marked an intensification of the air campaign against Taliban military sites and leaders. It also signaled U.S. confidence that more than a week of attacks by ship-launched cruise missiles and high-flying jets had greatly eased the threat from Taliban air defense.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, in neighboring Pakistan to shore up support for the U.S.-led campaign, said Afghanistan's Islamic regime was "under enormous pressure," but refused to say whether he thought it was near collapse.

With Powell beside him, Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf told an Islamabad news conference the military strikes should be "short and targeted."

Today's fresh waves of air strikes targeted the Taliban on multiple fronts--military bases and airports outside the capital of Kabul, Taliban leaders' southern base city of Kandahar and the key northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif--a former opposition stronghold.

Meanwhile, declaring the threat of bioterrorism is no joking matter, Attorney General John Ashcroft said today those who fake anthrax or other terrorist scares will face federal prosecution; and announced the indictment of one such man in Connecticut.

False threats of anthrax attacks are "grotesque transgressions of the public trust," Ashcroft said at a news conference. The hoaxes. Ashcroft said, tax the resources of an already overburdened law enforcement system.