Return to Transcripts main page

American Morning

U.S. Says Ground Troops are in Afghanistan

Aired October 19, 2001 - 10:02   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: I want to turn our attention back, now, to the military campaign being led against targets on the ground in Afghanistan. As we have mentioned for the past several hours, there is word that U.S. troops are operating on the ground in parts of Afghanistan, chiefly believed to be in the southern part of that country.

At the Pentagon, CNN's Brooks Jackson trying to piece things together from there this morning.

Brooks, are you getting much out of there?

BROOKS JACKSON, CNN MILITARY AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: Good morning Bill.

No, not much more than you've reported. But here's what we can say: that a senior U.S. official is confirming that U.S. ground forces are in Afghanistan, have been there for a number of days. They are there in "very limited numbers" -- that's a quote. Not a pretty big quote, but it's a quote. They are Special Forces units, they are highly trained. Beyond that, we don't know what branch of the service we're talking about here. We don't know exactly what the mission is.

The "Washington Post" is reporting that these ground troops are in support of CIA operations, trying to recruit defectors from the Taliban from among the Pashtun ethnic group, the dominant ethnic group in the country. We are told that they're operating in the southern part of the country.

We can speculate that if the past practices have been followed, that they're also scouting targets for bombers. And that happened during the Gulf War; specially trained units were in and out operating behind enemy lines all the time. In fact, yesterday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld practically said as much.

He said U.S. airplanes can't do it alone.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD RUMSFELD, DEFENSE SECRETARY: You know, they're powerful and they know they can do certain things within reasonable degrees of accuracy.

We also know they can't do other things. They can't crawl around on the ground and find people. That being the case, what one has to do is to start out by trying to create an environment in the air that our forces can function in reasonable safety. And second, then to develop interaction with the ground so that one can develop targets and get good information that is better than one can get from the air and coordinate an air-ground effort.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JACKSON: So there you have a picture of U.S. forces crawling around on the ground and developing targets. From that -- perhaps we'll learn more this afternoon. There's a 1:30 Pentagon briefing.

So Bill, stay tuned.

HEMMER: You got it, we will; Brooks, thank you.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR U.S.E OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com