Within a week, United States President Donald Trump authorised two major strikes—one against the Syrian Air Force and the other against an ISIS base in Afghanistan. Both of these strikes came with little warning, although these are not the first such attacks in either sector. The U.S. has bombed Syria almost 8,000 times over the past few years and Iraq uncountable times since 2003, dropping ordnance that has already dwarfed the tonnage dropped in all sectors of the Second World War. But these bombing raids were against the ISIS, largely, and not the Syrian government.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. has been at war since 2001—making this the longest war in its history. Aerial bombardment of Afghanistan by the U.S. is now perfectly normal. What made this attack so extraordinary was the scale of the bomb—a-10-tonne monstrosity, the largest non-nuclear weapon used on planet earth. Not long after Afghanistan’s eastern province of Nangarhar shuddered with the intensity of that bomb, a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) spokesperson talked to The Hill (a Washington D.C.-based political newspaper and website) about the attack. President Trump, said this military spokesperson, had given his armed forces greater latitude to fight the War on Terror. This freedom in combat, said the anonymous spokesperson, was “empowering the commanders and winning the war against the bad guys. In this administration, the military is given empowerment to do what we need to do”. Most stunningly,…