"Now the B-52, with its heavy payload of ordnance, is back at the centre of the United States's air campaign." B-52H Stratofortress bomber over Afghanistan, 2006. Credit: Flickr/Gonzalo Alonso. Some rights reserved.Afghanistan has somewhat fallen off the radar of western media, even though violent conflict there continues unabated. An exception is major incidents such as the ten-hour attack and siege against the American University in Kabul on 24 August, which killed fourteen people and injured many more. This rightly attracted attention as a grim indicator of continued Taliban activity, as did the bombing of a Hazara protest march on 23 July, also in the capital, when eighty people died and 250 were wounded.
But other developments in the Afghan conflict, which are barely reported or even ignored by establishment media in the west, can carry much greater significance. So it was this week with a report at the bottom of an inside page of a leading military journal: “B-52 bombers rejoin US campaign in Afghanistan”.
There is an echo here of the aftermath of 9/11, when the B-52H Stratofortress long-range heavy bomber was used extensively as a major part of the operation to terminate the Taliban regime and defeat al-Qaida. The aircraft played an occasional part for the next three years, but has now been absent from the scene for a decade as other bombers, including the B-1B, took its place. Now the B-52, with its heavy payload of ordnance, is back at the centre of the United States's air campaign. Since April, deployed from the Al Udeid airbase in Qatar, B-52s have conducted more than 325 strikes in almost 270 sorties, using over 1,300 weapons.
