WASHINGTON: Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai said on Sunday that his successor Ashraf Ghani was a traitor because he allowed the United States to drop the largest non-nuclear bomb on Afghanistan’s soil.

He also pledged to oust US forces from Afghanistan.

In a series of interviews to US and international media outlets, Mr Karzai said that dropping the bomb was a “brutal act against innocent people” and was also a threat to Afghan sovereignty.

On Thursday, a US aircraft dropped the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) bomb on a complex of caves and tunnels used by of Khorasan fighters of the militant Islamic State group in Nangarhar province.

This was the first time that the device, also known as the Mother of All Bombs, was ever used in a combat. It reportedly killed almost 100 militants, including scores of TTP fighters from Pakistan based in this camp inside Afghanistan. The uproar over the bombing intensified as President Trump’s national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, arrived in Kabul on Saturday.

Published in Dawn, April 17th, 2017