Daily Times

Donald Trump has struck back. No more skulking in a corner pouting over the fact that his Former Best Friend Forever was going ahead with hosting a conference on Afghan peace in Moscow, despite his own petulant no-show. Oh, those Russians.

Under natural circumstances, a simple RSVP might have sufficed. Yet American ‘exceptionalism dictates that there is no need to say it with flowers when you can say it all with a 21,000-pound explosive; the largest non-nuclear weapon that the conventional US arsenal has to offer. That it was test-run in Afghanistan raises serious concerns for that country and for the region as a whole. We stand with the people of Afghanistan.

All indications point to a strategic strike. Meaning that nothing adds up in terms of the input-output paradigm, given that the US has put ISIS fatalities at 94. Someone should tell the apprentice-president that this was one occasion where he shouldn’t have bothered firing anything. Yet it is part of this administration’s concerted warmongering posture, which has in its sights Iran, Syria, Afghanistan and now North Korea. That the mother of all bombs struck close to the Pakistan border should not go unnoticed in Islamabad. Part of the official US rationale for the Nangarhar strike is that unmanned drones are proving ineffective. Precision killing by remote control is only as good the intelligence provided. And given perceptions of Pakistan’s double gaming on this front – the state may do well to consider this a formal warning.

Yet the hit raises more questions than it answers. Firstly, what does this mean for the Afghan peace process? Secondly, why strike ISIS when it is the Taliban that is reportedly the more deadly of the two in terms of US interests? And thirdly, how do we actually know who is ISIS, who is Taliban and who is just a run-of-the-mill warlord? In her book, Farewell Kabul, British journalist Christina Lamb raises this point. Recalling her various stints of embedment with both the British and American military in Afghanistan – she notes how the latter was ill-equipped to identify one group from another. Resultantly, locals were known to snitch on those against whom they held a personal grudge of one sort or another. And the world’s most sophisticated and well-armed military was so ill-informed when it came to ground realities that it found itself faced with a single option: to take everything everyone said at face value and hope for the best while getting all gung-ho and trigger for added measure.

Trump inherited this war just as Obama did before him. Yet neither has shown the will to finish what had been pre-emptively started. In the first three months of 2017, Trump has dropped 450 missiles on Afghanistan. The message is clear: big boys don’t cry, they just drop the ‘mother’ of all bombs. *