The mother of all bombs: dropped on Isis

When the blast came, at 7.32pm last Thursday, “a giant white flash” lit up the evening sky over Afghanistan’s Spin Ghar mountains, said Sune Engel Rasmussen in The Guardian. It felt, said witnesses, “like an earthquake”. Miles away, walls were cracked and windows were shattered. US forces had just dropped the largest nonnuclear bomb ever used in combat on a network of caves and tunnels used by Isis fighters in Nangarhar Province, near the Pakistan border. The GBU-43/B Moab – Massive Ordnance Air Blast, known as the “mother of all bombs” – has an explosive yield of 11 tonnes, and is so big that it has to be dropped from a cargo plane. It obliterated the tunnel network and left a crater nearly 1,000ft wide; Afghan forces, sent to mop up, said that 94 Isis fighters were killed. Despite the damage, local villagers seemed satisfied that the area had been cleared of militants.

During last year’s campaign, Donald Trump promised to “bomb the shit” out of Isis. He seems to be making good on his pledge, said Rob Crilly in The Daily Telegraph. But tactically, the decision was questionable. Each Moab reportedly costs some $16m. Why expend such a massive amount on a small number of jihadists? Isis in Afghanistan is a mere splinter group of the Taliban; they have limited power and are not linked except by name to Isis in Syria and Iraq. Was the bombing just a demonstration of “US might”?

President Trump has given his generals a new “freedom on the battlefield”, said Rhys Blakely in The Times. A plan drafted by his defence secretary, James Mattis, calls for commanders fighting Isis to be given much greater latitude to launch raids and air strikes, so they can destroy the militants’ strongholds without the “endless deliberation” of the Obama years. But the Moab attack is unlikely to change the course of the Afghan war, said Simon Tisdall in The Guardian. Such “shock and awe” tactics have rarely helped in the past; they have tended to turn local populations against the US. Isis has been making gains in Afghanistan. “The Taliban is also resurgent.” Using the “mother of all bombs” merely emphasises the US’S failure to win this “father all of wars” – a conflict begun by George W. Bush, and now in its 16th year.