U.S. military officials made mistakes but were not guilty of criminal negligence in a mistargeted drone strike that killed 10 Afghan civilians and served as a grim capstone to the chaotic American withdrawal from the country in late August, the Air Force’s top internal watchdog told reporters Wednesday.
Signs that the target of the Kabul attack — a suspected terrorist handling bombs who turned out to be an Afghan national who worked for an American aid organization — were missed in the lead-up to the strike, the investigation found.
A child could be seen on surveillance video of the Kabul compound minutes before the U.S. drone strike mistakenly killed the 10 civilians, including seven children. The operation came in the tense days just after the deadly Islamic State suicide bombing at Kabul’s international airport that killed 13 American troops and more than 170 Afghan civilians.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Sami Said, the service’s independent inspector general, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that the presence of the child could easily have been missed by intelligence analysts overseeing the operation from a station in Qatar.
“Mistakes do happen in military operations. I understand they reached the wrong conclusions,” he said. “It was not unreasonable. It just turned out to be wrong.”
Gen. Said acknowledged that the errors and misjudgment didn’t rise to the level of criminal conduct. It will be up to commanders to decide whether anyone could face military discipline measures over what happened.
The intelligence analysts were focusing on a white Toyota Corolla linked to terrorists of an Islamic State branch active in Afghanistan and that they “genuinely believed” there was an imminent plot to attack more Americans. Gen. Said said U.S. officials had been watching the car for several hours prior to the drone strike and blamed possible “confirmation bias” for the decision to trigger the missile. Analysts may have been too ready to accept any information that met their preconceived interpretation of the situation on the ground.
Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and ground force commander at the scene, made the final call to authorize the strike, according to Gen. Said.
Zemerai Ahmadi, 37, a longtime employee of California-based Nutrition and Education International, was among those who were killed. His company’s president expressed frustration with the Pentagon’s latest findings.
Steven Kwon, the group’s co-founder and president called the investigation “deeply disappointing and inadequate.”
“According to the inspector general, there was a mistake but no one acted wrongly, and I’m left wondering, how can that be?” Mr. Kwon said in a statement sent to Reuters.
The group had previously pressed the Pentagon to expedite the resettlement process for Ahmadi’s relatives who could face reprisals from Afghanistan’s new Taliban leadership and expressed concern for the safety of Afghan employees of the NGO “who are now branded as ISIS terrorists.”
Gen. Said told reporters Wednesday that “the issue here is to figure out what we could have done better to make sure this never happens again.”
Soon after the strike, U.S. officials pointed to video that seemed to show secondary explosions as a sign that the mission had been a success. Gen. Said said their investigation indicated the blast may have been a nearby propane tank, however.
U.S. officials have offered condolence payments to relatives of those who were killed in the drone strike.