Smashing.Clinton Huxley wrote:CES is correct, above - the US did blow up a lot of caves in Afghanistan. The War on Caves was a total success....
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/26/inter ... wanted=allMOSCOW, Nov. 25 — The Qaeda military base called Zhawar Kili Al- Badr also has a nickname: Wolf's Hole.
Zhawar worms its way deep inside the walls of a gorge in the Sodyaki Ghar mountains of eastern Afghanistan, a half-mile lattice of caves and connecting tunnels barely 4,000 yards from the Pakistan border. The Soviet Army took it in 1986 during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but only after 57 days of aerial bombardment and hand-to-hand combat.
"It was seized, blown up. Everything was blown up," Maj. Gen. Aleksandr Lyakhovsky, an Afghanistan veteran now retired from Russian military service, said in a recent interview. "And then the forces left. And in about six months or a year, they restored the base."
It is in a place like Zhawar, a mountain base called Tora Bora also near the Pakistan border, that the Afghan rumor mill now says Osama bin Laden is hiding with some 1,200 Taliban troops.
Indeed, Pentagon documents for 2002 state that the military is already testing tunnel-destroying weapons at American proving grounds in the West, aimed specifically at "proliferant nations or terrorists with access to advanced conventional weapons or weapons of mass destruction."
With the United States' advanced detection devices and high-technology munitions, the network of Afghan caves and tunnels is neither as befuddling nor as impregnable as it was to the Soviets. The Pentagon says American warplanes have been bombing carefully selected caves and tunnels for weeks now, directing 500-pound bombs at their mouths to block the entrances and larger munitions to hit suspected weapons dumps and other strategic sites.
Mr. Rumsfeld said last month that some strikes had produced "enormous secondary explosions," sometimes continuing for hours after American jets first attacked.
But the system remains devilishly complex and easy to hide within. As even the Pentagon admits, the most heavily fortified parts, where Mr. bin Laden may be concealed, could well be invulnerable to the most powerful conventional bombs known.
