The U.S. War in Afghanistan entered a fourth week yesterday with no sign of the Taliban crumbling and the mounting number of civilian casualties adding to pressure for a change of strategy. A U.S. bomb flattened a home in Kabul yesterday, blowing apart seven children as they ate breakfast with their father. The blast also shattered a neighbor’s house, killing another two children. Meanwhile, U.S. planes mistakenly bombed a village north of Kabul in territory controlled by the opposition Northern Alliance on Saturday, killing another two civilians. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld refused to comment on the civilian deaths. He said the campaign is “going very much as expected, it is going very much as predicted. … It’s not a quagmire.” The Taliban says that U.S. forces have killed a thousand civilians so far, while the wire service Agence France-Presse estimates around 400 have been killed.

The International Campaign to Ban Landmines in Geneva this weekend urged the United States to halt the reported dropping of landmines in its military campaign against Afghanistan and called on other countries to join the protest. U.S. authorities have neither confirmed nor denied an October 11 report by The New York Times that said U.S. aircraft had begun dropping gator mines aimed at both vehicles and people on foot. Another group, Handicap International, urged the U.S. to respect the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning landmines, which Washington has not signed. The group also appealed to France and Britain, which have approved the Ottawa Convention, to support its efforts to see NATO adopt an edict forbidding the use of landmines in Afghanistan.

Unrest in Pakistan has severely escalated over the last few days. On Thursday, as Pakistani fundamentalists blocked the main highway to China, the ancient Silk Route, rolling boulders onto it and planting landmines, hundreds of trucks and cars remain blocked as authorities negotiate with the protesters today. Meanwhile, hundreds of heavily armed Pakistanis seized local government offices in the northern town of Chilas and demanded Pakistan stop supporting U.S.-led strikes. Thousands of tribesmen, armed with rocket launchers, automatic rifles, swords and axes, are massing at the Afghan border to join the war against the United States. On Friday, at least 50,000 people took to the streets of Karachi in the largest protest since the U.S. began bombing of Afghanistan three weeks ago. Protesters burned effigies of President Bush and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Another 20,000 demonstrated in Quetta. And yesterday, gunmen entered a Roman Catholic church in a Pakistani town and killed 18 worshipers. The New York Times reports worshipers had almost no chance. Blood went everywhere, forming large pools against the walls beneath shattered stained-glass windows. Most believe the killers were acting to avenge the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan.

The Taliban reportedly assassinated a prominent Afghan opposition leader, Abdul Haq, on Friday. He had entered Afghanistan to try to build an anti-Taliban coalition. While many analysts say his assassination is a major setback for U.S. post-Taliban plans, it appears that Haq actually had little support from the U.S. The United States refused to help him, offering him nothing more than satellite phones for his risky mission into Afghanistan. In recent weeks, Haq had criticized the U.S. bombing raids, saying they were backfiring and making it harder to turn the Pashtun tribespeople against the Taliban. Haq also argued repeatedly that the U.S., having sown the seeds of victory against the Soviets in the 1980s, would reap a whirlwind of hatred if it did not help cultivate civil society in Afghanistan. In a 1994 interview with The New York Times, he said, “For us, Afghanistan is destroyed. It is turning to poison, and not only for us but for all others in the world. If you are a terrorist, you can have shelter here, no matter who you are.” He predicted, “Maybe one day they will have to send hundreds of thousands of troops to deal with that, and if they step in, they will be stuck. We have a British grave in Afghanistan. We have a Soviet grave. And then we will have an American grave.”

And there have been several developments in the anthrax outbreak. A female New Jersey postal worker has become the nation’s latest confirmed case of inhaled anthrax. Justice Department officials last night said that anthrax has been found at a facility in Landover, Maryland, that handles mail for the Justice Department. The Supreme Court has closed, forcing it to meet elsewhere today for the first time in its building’s 66-year history. The structure was closed after anthrax was detected Friday at a remote mail handling facility serving the court. And the New York Medical Examiner’s Office is reevaluating the death of a postal worker, Laura Jones. She died on October 10 of what was deemed natural causes, but they’re now looking to see if it was anthrax-related.