Since Thursday, there has been a great buzz surrounding the Trump administration’s dropping a 21,000 pound GPS guided GBU-43, the “Mother of all Bombs” (MOAB) on underground Islamic State hideouts in Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan.
Originally developed for use in the Operation Iraqi Freedom, the MOAB is so big it had to be dropped from the rear door of a MC-130 cargo plane. It fell with a parachute and then detonated before hitting the ground, igniting flammable fuel mist that can obliterate the equivalent of nine city blocks.
Donald Trump was elated by the MOAB’s use, stating that “we have the greatest military in the world….If you look at what’s happened over the last eight weeks and compare that really to what’s happened over the past eight years, you’ll see there’s a tremendous difference, tremendous difference.”
A different perspective was provided by former Afghan president Hamid Karzai who tweeted: “This is not the War on Terror but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as a testing ground for new and dangerous weapons. It is up to you Afghans to stop the USA.”
Gersh Kuntzman of The Daily News referred to the media coverage of the MOAB as akin to “death porn” in its celebratory, voyeuristic quality.
This latest superweapon cannot tip the balance in America’s longest war, however.
A U.S. military mission this summer said that only 63 percent of the country’s territory was under government control compared to 72 percent in 2015, with the Taliban estimated to control 33 districts (10%) and one quarter of the country being contested.
Much like in the Vietnam War, the U.S. military has alienated many Afghans through revenge operations, unjustified killings, mutilations and other atrocities like the bombing of a doctor’s without borders hospital, while supporting a corrupt government allied with opium-tainted warlords.
The Taliban and other insurgents have been able to offset America and NATOs technological superiority in turn through use of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and suicide and car bombs (“the poor man’s Air force”) and other guerilla tactics previously deployed against the Russians.
In his book War Stars, H. Bruce Franklin details the American infatuation with developing a super-weapon capable of saving humanity from peril and ostensibly making war more humane by quickly and decisively eradicating the enemy.
Franklin includes discussion of late 19th century fiction which promoted a “cult of made-in America superweapons and ecstatic visions of America defeating evil empires, waging wars to end all wars, and making the world eternally safe for democracy.”
A young Harry S. Truman eagerly consumed some of the stories as a subscriber to McClure’s Magazine and would go on to use the ultimate super-weapon on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
His world view grew out of a society author Neil Postman characterized as a technopoly, in which the deification of technological innovation substitutes for cultural or spiritual depth and in which technology is considered the main solution to social problems.
The dropping of the MOAB fits with a deep rooted cultural mindset which believes that powerful superweapons can win wars and eradicate evil.
John W. Nicholson, Commander of the U.S. Forces in Afghanistan said the MOAB was “the right weapon against the right target. It was the right time to use it tactically against the right target on the battlefield."
However, residents living two kilometers (1.5 miles) from the blast told CNN they had heard an "extremely loud boom that smashed the windows of our house," and “were all scared; my children and my wife were crying. We thought it had happened right in front of our house…I have witnessed countless number of explosions and bombings in the last 30 years of war in Afghanistan, but this one was more powerful than any other bomb as far as I remember."
The MOAB is thus bound to ignite more anger and fear among Afghans, which can be exploited by insurgents and will negate any potential battlefield gains. It is part of a long line of war star illusions that has sustained our permanent warfare state.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is author of Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Massachusetts Press, 2012) and writing a book entitled Technological Rampage: American Military Interventions and Political Miscalculation from the Korean War to the Endless War on Terror.