US drops largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan

[IceCold]

Then maybe the others shouldn't prompt me to say such things.

Others will prompt you on many other things as well in real life too, does that mean you will lose your cool and come out with such absurd notions? Think

 

[Penguin]

Of course, I'm proud of it!

You are proud of not learning abou democracy... ok. Nuf said. Democracy is off topic in this thread.

 

[vostok]

You are proud of not learning abou democracy... ok. Nuf said. Democracy is off topic in this thread.

I'm proud that nobody dares to teach Russia democracy with some bombs.

 

[Penguin]

I'm proud that nobody dares to teach Russia democracy with some bombs.

Perhaps you should be glad, rather than proud.
US informed Russia of Syria strike and Syrians still got hit....

 

[vostok]

Perhaps you should be glad, rather than proud.
US informed Russia of Syria strike and Syrians still got hit....

As far as I know, Syria is not Russia.

 

[Hamza913]

Others will prompt you on many other things as well in real life too, does that mean you will lose your cool and come out with such absurd notions? Think

I didn't lose my cool I, I simply responded.

In real life I would have said the same thing, although it probably wouldn't have come off as ghastly.

 

[VFY]

 

[Penguin]

As far as I know, Syria is not Russia.

That is correct. Just looking at how allies take care of one another.

 

[Hindustani78]

http://zeenews.india.com/world/afgh...ith-shock-awe-and-mixed-feelings-1996226.html

Afghanistan: Qari Mehrajuddin first saw "lightning like a thunder storm" followed by the roar of an explosion, an all-to-familiar sound for residents in Afghanistan`s war-torn Nangarhar province.

"I thought there was a bombing just outside my home," he said.

In reality, the blast was around three miles away, its massive impact bigger than any before seen in the region.

On Thursday night, American forces dropped one of the largest conventional bombs ever used in combat on what they described as a tunnel complex used by Islamic State militants in Nangarhar`s Achin district.

Achin is separated from Pakistan by a range of high mountains, one of the areas where Taliban and al Qaeda fighters fled when the United States first intervened in the country in late 2001.


Now US officials say militants affiliated to the Middle East-based Islamic State network have begun fortifying caves in the region in an effort to hold off joint operations by Afghan and US forces.

Some residents in areas of Achin recently liberated from Islamic State occupation welcomed Thursday`s strike, which hit headlines around the world and has been widely interpreted as a deliberate show of strength by U.S. President Donald Trump.

"If you want to destroy and eliminate Daesh, then even if you destroy my home we won`t complain, because they are not human beings, they are savages," said resident Mir Alam Shinwari, using an Arabic term for Islamic State.

Shinwari described a litany of abuses he said were committed by Islamic State fighters.

"They used to marry our daughters and wives to their fighters, blamed residents for spying, they beheaded, cut (off) hands and did not allow mobile phones that had cameras," he told Reuters.

That sentiment was echoed by Gul Sher, another resident who called on the United States and the Afghan government to "hit Daesh and wipe them out completely."

"We were so fed up with the atrocities of Daesh and they were against everything we are," he said.
Away from the area directly impacted by the blast, the reaction was more mixed.

"The fact is that America used their big bomb here to test its effectiveness," said Kabul resident Asadullah Khaksar. "If America wants to eliminate Daesh, it is very easy because they created this group."

Rahim Khan, another Kabul resident, also took a skeptical view of America`s role in the fighting.

"If this bombing was indeed for the elimination of Daesh this is a good move, but I don`t believe it," he said. "This is all imposed on Afghanistan for proxy war."

Some Afghans remain deeply suspicious of Washington`s motives in sending troops to the country more than 15 years ago, and view their ongoing presence as a form of occupation.

Others are glad of their intervention, fearing that the alternative would be a return to the strict Islamist rule of the Taliban, ousted from power in 2001 but fighting a stubborn insurgency that is costing thousands of lives every year.

Defending his decision to deploy the bomb, General John Nicholson, top US commander in Afghanistan, called Islamic State fighters "animals" for conducting attacks against targets like a hospital in Kabul.

"The Afghan army, and specifically their commandos, are leading the fight against these barbaric terrorists," he told journalists in Kabul on Friday.

"They`re doing it on behalf of the people of Afghanistan and indeed, they are doing it on behalf of all of us."


First Published: Friday, April 14, 2017 - 21:56

http://zeenews.india.com/world/isla...from-huge-us-bomb-in-afghanistan-1996189.html

Cairo: The Islamic State group denied on Friday it had suffered casualties from the US military`s largest non-nuclear bomb which hit its mountain hideouts in Afghanistan, in a statement on its propaganda agency Amaq.


"Security source to Amaq agency denies any dead or wounded from yesterday`s American strike in Nangarhar using a GBU-43/B," the group`s self-styled news agency said on social media accounts.

The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb -- dubbed the "Mother Of All Bombs" -- was unleashed in combat for the first time on Thursday, hitting IS positions in eastern Nangarhar province.


First Published: Friday, April 14, 2017 - 20:02

 

[vostok]

That is correct. Just looking at how allies take care of one another.

Reasonable people will try to avoid a war of total annihilation.

 

[Penguin]

Reasonable people will try to avoid a war of total annihilation.

We can only hope Russia is reasonable ;-)

But you do admit dropping MOAB has no relation to democracy or bringing it: it is a tool of modern warfare, just like FOAB (which was not developed - after MOAB - without good reason, just like e.g. shortrange thermobaric rockets of TOS system).

So, you image was out of place here. It suggests things that aren't there.

 

[Styx]

http://www.thehindu.com/news/intern...afghanistan/article18013941.ece?homepage=true

'Trump administration should confront Pakistan'

Washington: Close on the heels of the U.S dropping its most lethal non-nuclear bomb on an Islamic State target in Afghanistan, a former U.S diplomat urged the Donald Trump administration to consider hitting terrorist sanctuaries inside Pakistan. Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, said the single most important factor of instability in Afghanistan is the continuing sanctuary for Taliban in Pakistani territory.

“Today we are talking about the mother of bombs. The mother of all problems in Afghanistan is the sanctuary (for Taliban inside Pakistan),” he said adding, ““If you respect the sanctuary and you don't attack it, you are allowing the insurgency to go on.”

As part of the Trump administration’s ongoing review of the U.S policy on Afghanistan, National Security Adviser Lt Gen H R McMaster will be traveling to Kabul, Islamabad and New Delhi over the weekend. “We should not be accepting safe sanctuaries as something normal. We ought to make that very very clear to Pakistan," Mr. Khalilzad said. "I hope that the NSA makes that point clear when he sits across the table when he is in Islamabad,” the former diplomat said at a discussion at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank.

“Being in Afghanistan and being successful will make us stronger. IS is being defeated in Syria and Iraq and they are trying to move to Afghanistan,” the diplomat said, rejecting a suggestion that America could leave Afghanistan to resolve its problems by itself.

Speaking at another event in the city, Pakistan’s former military ruler Pervez Musharraf said that the US committed “blunder” by not turning its military victory in Afghanistan into a political one post 9/11. “After 9/11 Taliban and Al-Qaeda were defeated in Afghanistan. This was military victory. This military victory was to be converted into a political one,” Mr. Musharraf said at a conference on Pakistan organised by the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University.

Mr. Khalilzad said the final solution can only be political, but the duplicity of Pakistan, particularly the then ruler Musharraf, was the key obstacle to a political settlement then. Recalling that the U.S had a golden opportunity in Afghanistan immediately after the overthrow of the Taliban regime, the former ambassador recalled a meeting with Mr. Musharraf. “Musharraf was very clever in denying that he was allowing Taliban a sanctuary in Pakistan. Once I went to talk to him and he flatly told me that there is no Taliban in Pakistan. He began saying, ‘give me their phone numbers..give me their addresses’…I said, ‘Mr. President, the leadership is called the Quetta Shura, and Quetta, I understand is in Baluchistan. ” Quetta Shura was the Talibani leadership council that was based in Pakistan. Mr. Khalilzad said due to “a variety of reasons” the U.S could not confront Pakistan more strongly on the issue then. “They were helping us on some issues, and it was a complicated relationship.”

Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s former Ambassador to the U.S and Director for South and Central Asia at Hudson said the war in Afghanistan “will have a crucial impact on the global war on Islamist terrorism.” Robin Raphel, former U.S Assistant Secretary of State, argued that by supporting Taliban, Pakistan was truing to hedge its bets in Afghanistan.

She called for clearer commitment from by the U.S on its plans for Afghanistan, a position that was contested by both Mr. Haqqani and Mr. Khalilzad. They said Pakistan has legitimate interests in Afghanistan, but its concern about Indian influence is misplaced, vague and ideological more than anything substantive. “Pakistan has never been firm on what exactly are their core concerns,” Mr. Khalilzad said.

so does that mean that the republic of India will be of having good relations with united states ?

 

[vostok]

We can only hope Russia is reasonable ;-)

It is not Russia's rationality is questionable right now
I wish Westerners return to the good old colonial rhetoric and stop pretending that their wars have something common with the spread of law and democracy.

 

[VFY]

 

[Broccoli]

I presume that is why Russia has its FOAB?

FOAB seems to be more or less a propaganda stunt like the Tsar bomb.

But close analysis of the video reveals inconsistencies that have led some U.S. experts to question the veracity of the Russian claims, and to downgrade assessments of the weapon. It's possible, they say, that the video was partially faked, and that the test was hyped for political reasons. "You've got to approach Russian claims with skepticism," says John Pike, an analyst at the think tank GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Virginia. Russian state-run television released this video of a bomber dropping the "Father of all Bombs" last month.

Screenshot: Channel One It's not even clear what kind of weapon the Russians tested -- if it was what some experts call a "fuel-air explosive," or if it was a "thermobaric" weapon. Fuel-air and thermobaric bombs differ in usefulness. Traditional bombs rely on metal fragments propelled by TNT to do their damage. Thermobaric weapons, by contrast, release a massive shockwave. They're meant for taking out big buildings and cave complexes, places where fragmentation doesn't work very well, explains Tom Burky, a senior research scientist at Battelle, an Ohio-based defense contractor.

Thermobaric blasts can push around corners and down corridors. Fuel-air bombs, on the other hand, have a small explosive device connected to a large tank of compressed fuel. The tank cracks on impact with the ground, spreading a cloud of fuel vapor. The warhead explodes, igniting the fuel. The effect is roughly the same, but fuel-air bombs are much more finicky than thermobarics, according to Burky. "The mixing process is highly randomized -- very difficult to control on the battlefield." The official video compares the Russian bomb to the thermobaric GBU-43, but the weapon depicted in the video appears to be a fuel-air explosive, based on its shape, Burky says. Regardless, Phillip Coyle, an adviser to the Washington, D.C., Center for Defense Information, says he is skeptical about Father of All Bombs' true power. "It (the blast) may be bigger than MOAB," he concedes, "but it's not four times bigger -- at best 50 percent bigger, just going on the bomb's size and how these bombs are designed."

FOAB's ski-like legs -- and the drag-'chute lines seen on top -- indicate the bomb was released by a slow-flying cargo plane, contrary to Russian claims. Image: Channel One The force of a thermobaric/fuel-air blast is a function of the fuel type, the proportions of fuel and high explosive, and the way these elements mix during the blast. "The difficulty with bombs of this type is predicting the shape of the blast," Pike says. Teasing a fourfold improvement over the MOAB would require sophisticated chemistry, according to Burky, and that would challenge what Pike describes as cash-strapped Russian military labs. Despite his skepticism regarding many Russian military developments, Pike says he believes that the Father of All Bombs is roughly as powerful as the Russians claim. What he doesn't necessarily buy is that the weapon is actually new.

The Russian military has a tendency to rename old weapons in order to create the impression that they are new, Pike says. The Russians have possessed a range of thermobaric weapons for at least four decades. The details of the "new" bomb's provenance and design are murky, but one thing is clear. The Father of All Bombs’ test model was not delivered by a Tu-160 bomber, as implied. Nowhere in the video are the bomber and the bomb in the same shot. The Father of All Bombs, as shown, would not fit in a Tu-160's bomb bay, as it features a horizontally deploying drogue parachute that would be fouled by the aircraft if released vertically. The only way to deploy a bomb like this is to slide it out of the cargo hold of an airlifter, as the U.S. Air Force has done with its fuel-air "Daisy Cutter" bombs used in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/avbpm.htm