Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai is mincing no words in assessing the United States' bombing of an ISIS stronghold with its second-largest non-nuclear device, reports the New York Times: "Shame, shame," he says of current President Ashraf Ghani's admission that his government coordinated the bombing with the Trump administration. "No Afghan with self-respect would do that. He is a traitor, a traitor." Karzai further said he will work toward "ousting the US," and the Times notes that he has grown more vocal in his anti-American sentiment since leaving office—despite having largely come to power on the back of the American military. Karzai is denouncing the bomb to anyone who will listen, telling al Jazeera that "This was an inhuman act, a brutal act against an innocent country, against innocent people, against our land, against our sovereignty, against our soil and against our future."
Ghani's office wouldn't respond directly, but said only in a statement that "Every Afghan has the right to speak their mind. This is a country of free speech." The Times finds dissent on the bombing within Afghanistan, with one conservative Islamist party rep dismissing the use of the so-called "Mother of all Bombs" as nothing more than a show of American power for the benefit of the likes of North Korea. A powerful governor, meanwhile, said he was in favor of the MOAB, as well as any "crackdown on insurgents and fundamentalists." But most Afghans will consider the messenger in evaluating Karzai's anti-American comments, a journalist tells al Jazeera: "At least for a decade, he was using US bodyguards to protect himself. Now he is talking about pushing the US to leave Afghanistan. This is something people will not believe." (More Hamid Karzai stories.)
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