Rumsfeld urges media patience

Urging patience on a media hungry for events to report, the US Secretary of Defence, Mr Don Rumsfeld, yesterday insisted the Afghan campaign was "a marathon not a sprint". "Three weeks is not bad," he said, for the work of establishing their ability to supply humanitarian aid and ammunition freely, the substantial enhancement of their targeting capabilities and ability to support opposition forces.

US strikes have killed some leaders of the al-Qaeda terrorist network but not the most senior ones, he said. He rejected the idea that there is growing impatience with the pace of the campaign. While there was an "appetite for events on behalf of the media", "the American people have a pretty good centre of gravity" on the issue. While he accepted that some allies, for reasons of local difficulty, were urging a slowdown in the campaign, the US would do what it had to to meet a real threat to its national security.

Mr Rumsfeld insisted that the US would retain its right to continue its campaign into Ramadan next month. "The history of warfare is that it has proceeded through Ramadan, year after year after year," he said.

Briefing journalists the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Brig Dick Myers, said that on Sunday the US used 65 aircraft, 55 of them carrier-based, to attack mainly emerging targets of opportunity most heavily on the front around the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, on new targets near the Tajik border, and around Kabul. They are also trying to hit cave hide-outs of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. A total of one million individual food rations have now been dropped.

He said that the military campaign was unfolding in line with their plans and its pace would not be determined by others.

President Bush later announced the establishment of a special task force to look at tracking terrorists internationally which will review the US's visa and immigration policies.

His spokesman, Mr Ari Fleischer, said he could not confirm a report in the Washington Post yesterday that US diplomats met Taliban representatives secretly at least 20 times over the last three years to discuss ways the regime could bring Osama bin Laden to justice. Mr Fleischer said he was not aware of such discussions.