According to foreign media reports such as the Washington Post, senior Pentagon officials announced on Wednesday that the drone strike launched by the US military in Kabul at the end of the war in Afghanistan caused the deaths of 10 civilians, not due to the criminal negligence of the military personnel who carried out the operation, so there is no need to propose any punishment for this incident.
A car after being attacked by a U.S. drone. Image source: Visual China
On August 29, local time, the US military man-aircraft launched an air strike near kabul airport, killing 10 civilians, including 7 minors. The Pentagon initially called the action a so-called "just strike," but after extensive media reports found out that it was not the case, the U.S. military eventually admitted to making a "tragic mistake" by mistaking a bucket-filled car driven by an employee of the U.S. NGO as a car carrying bombs.
Air Force Inspector General Sami D. Said led the investigation into the "catastrophic" airstrike. He determined that the strike did not violate international law on the war, but exposed a so-called "confirmation bias" between commanders and intelligence analysts who misread the actions of car drivers monitored by drones as a threat to U.S. military-led evacuations from Kabul airfields.
Post-mortem photographs of children killed in U.S. drone strikes. Image source: Visual China
The strike came days after 13 U.S. troops and more than 170 Afghans were killed in a suicide bomb attack by the extremist group Islamic State. Afterwards, the intelligence obtained by the US side indicated that the Islamic State may launch another attack on the US military.
"In this investigation, the people interviewed for the strike were convinced at the time that their target posed an imminent threat to U.S. forces at Kabul airfield," Said said. He also concluded that given the "very high threat to the U.S. military," the adoption of rules of engagement for drone strikes is understandable, but poor communication between the personnel involved means that the intelligence they are interpreting has not been necessarily questioned.
In the report, Saeed said that when he further reviewed the drone's video and data, he was able to see evidence of the presence of children at the scene about two minutes before the drone launched the missile. But he argued that he discovered the presence of children when the video was fully censored after the incident, which was easy to ignore at the time of the incident.
Family members were innocently killed in airstrikes, grieving relatives. Image source: Visual China
Because the investigative report excludes criminal offenses, Said does not recommend disciplinary action against those involved, but he said it should be left to the commander to decide whether to take any accountability measures.
Steven Kwon, president of the U.S. NGO group who hired the driver of the car killed in the airstrike, said the findings were "very disappointing and inadequate." "I don't understand how the most powerful military in the world could have tracked and monitored this aid worker in a commonly used car for eight hours without knowing who he was or why he was at U.S. aid headquarters," he wrote in a statement. According to the inspector general, there was a mistake, but no one did it wrong. I wonder, how is this possible? ”