Last Sunday's U.S. airstrike against al-Qaida targets in Somalia was seen by the Pentagon as a "blueprint" for its anti-terror missions carried around the globe, The New York Times reported on Saturday.

U.S. officials was quoted by the report as saying that the airstrike showed that even with the departure of Donald H. Rumsfeld from the Pentagon, U.S. special operation troops intended to take advantage of the directive given to them by Rumsfeld in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The recent military operations in Somalia have been carried out by the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command, which directs the military's most secretive and elite units, like the Army's Delta Force.

The Pentagon established a desolate outpost in the Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti in 2002 in part to serve as a hub for special missions to capture or kill senior al-Qaida leaders in the region.

Few such "high value" targets have materialized, and the Pentagon has gradually relocated members of the covert special operations units to more urgent missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But officials in Washington said this week that the joint command had quietly been returning troops and weaponry to the region in recent weeks in anticipation of a mission against members of an al-Qaida cell believed to be hiding in Somalia.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told members of Congress on Friday that the strike in Somalia was executed under the Pentagon's authority to hunt and kill terrorism suspects around the globe, a power the White House gave it shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

It was this authority that Rumsfeld used to order commanders to develop plans for using American special operations troops for missions within countries that had not been declared war zones.

But after the retreat of the Taliban in 2001, when U.S. Special Forces worked with Afghan militias, Rumsfeld's ambitious agenda for Special Operations troops has been slow to materialize.

The problem has partly been a shortage of valuable intelligence on the whereabouts of top terrorism suspects.

Pentagon officials said it is still not known whether any senior al-Qaida suspects or their allies were killed in the airstrike last Sunday.

Some critics of the Pentagon's aggressive use of special operations troops, including some Democratic members of Congress, have argued that using American forces outside of declared combat zones gives the Pentagon too much authority in sovereign nations and blurs the lines between soldiers and spies.

Source: Xinhua