WASHINGTON: Four ‘senior commanders’ of the groups that have moved to Afghanistan from Pakistan were among the 94 suspected militants killed by a US bomb dropped at a hideout in Nangarhar this week, official sources told Dawn.

On Thursday, the United States dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb at a tunnel complex of the militant group Islamic State of Khorasan (ISK). Known as the ‘mother of all bombs’, the weapon is officially called the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) and carries 22,000 pounds of explosives.

Afghan army officials said earlier that at least 36 militants were killed in the attack but on Saturday they increased the number to 94, adding that all belonged to the ISK.

Maj Sherin Aqa, head of public affairs for the 201st Corps of the Afghan security force in Nangarhar province, where the GBU-43B was detonated, told a US military newspaper, Stars and Stripes, that “four main commanders are among the 94 killed” in the attack.

He did not identify them but official sources in Washington said they were from the groups that previously operated from Pakistan but had moved to Afghanistan when Islamabad launched a series of military offensives against them. Most of those killed in the bombing were also from similar groups, the sources added.

Gen John Nicholson, commander of the US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, told a congressional hearing in February that most ISK fighters were former members of the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban (TTP). The TTP carried out dozens of terrorist attacks in Pakistan, including the December 2014 assault on the Army Public School in Peshawar, which killed 148 people, mostly children.

The TTP now maintains several bases inside Afghanistan and uses them for carrying out attacks in Pakistan.

Thursday’s bombing annoyed former Afghan president Hamid Karzai who urged the government in Kabul to stop Americans from using its territory for launching such assaults but his successor, Ashraf Ghani, said he had approved the bombing because it would help clear the militants from the area.

Gen Nicholson also defended the bombing, saying that the GBU-43 bomb was the “right weapon” to use against the tunnel complex as Afghan and US ground troops were finding it difficult to do so.

But Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as the US ambassador to the United Nations and Afghanistan in the Bush administration, urged Washington to launch similar strikes at alleged militant sanctuaries in Pakistan as well.

He claimed that attacks on US and Nato forces in Afghanistan were launched from those sanctuaries and “if we are attacked from those places… They would be legitimate targets for a response.”

Mr Khalilzad, who was speaking at a seminar at a Washington think-tank, the Hudson Institute on Friday, also called for changing the balance on the ground from the one of stalemate that had favoured the Taliban to one that favoured the Afghan government and the coalition forces.

Robin Raphel, a former assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, however, opposed the idea of an “all-out war” against Pakistan. “In my view, at the end of the day there has to be a negotiated political solution in Afghanistan, which would undoubtedly include some of the conservative elements including the Taliban in the government,” she said.

Hussain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to the US and the director, South and Central Asia, at the institute, who moderated the discussion, said the Taliban were irreconcilable.

Published in Dawn, April 16th, 2017