Aiming to deflect criticism about the Trump Administration’s use of the MOAB, or “Mother of All Bombs,” in the Nangarhar Province, Afghan officials issued a pair of dubious death tolls, first claiming a few dozen ISIS killed, then ratcheting that number up when the first figure didn’t play very well in the media.
Underscoring just how little the US cares about the consequences of the strikes, Defense Secretary James Mattis has insisted the US will never carry out any sort of investigation into what the result of the bombing was at all, saying the US don’t want to “get into that.”
Mattis insisted that he has “full confidence” in the commanders who made the decision to drop the MOAB, and that figuring out what happened was “probably not a good use of our troops’ time.” Instead, the official record will just assume that the incident went well.
The political leadership probably won’t make any sort of effort to look into what the MOAB did either, with the administration focusing primarily on the “message” that the bombing sent to North Korea about President Trump’s “resolve,” even though by all indications the decision on the MOAB was made well down the chain of command.
