AFGHANISTAN/FOREIGN POLICY/MILITARY/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “The dropping of a ‘mother of all bombs’ Thursday [4-13-17] by the United States on an ISIS cave and bunker complex in Achin district in eastern Afghanistan should be understood as part of an effort to reverse a war that is not going well for the Afghan government and, by extension, the United States.
The non-nuclear 21,600-pound GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB) ‘targeted a system of tunnels and caves that ISIS fighters use to move around freely,’ White House press secretary Sean Spicer said.
Thursday’s bombing had a feeling of deja vu. A decade and a half ago the US Air Force dropped massive 15,000 pound “Daisy Cutter” bombs on the Tora Bora complex where Osama bin Laden was hiding in December 2001. Achin district is only a dozen or so miles from the Tora Bora region.
While those Daisy Cutter bombs certainly killed many members of al Qaeda, bin Laden and many of his senior leaders escaped. That’s a useful reminder that very few military campaigns are won from the air.
There are perhaps secondary effects of Thursday’s bombing in Afghanistan such as signaling to the North Koreans and the Syrians that the United States can deploy such weapons against their bunker systems, but the key is that the war in Afghanistan is at a critical point.”
-Peter Bergen, “Why the ‘mother of all bombs’ and why now?,” CNN Opinion, CNN.com, April 14, 2017 7:05am