U.S. troops receive no penalty in strike that killed civilians

WASHINGTON — None of the military personnel involved in a botched drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed 10 civilians will face any kind of punishment after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin approved recommendations from two top commanders, a senior Pentagon official said.

The Pentagon acknowledged in September that the last U.S. drone strike before American troops withdrew from Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed the civilians, including seven children, after initially saying it had been necessary to prevent an Islamic State attack on troops.

A subsequent high-level investigation into the episode found no violations of law but stopped short of fully exonerating those involved, saying that was “commander business.”

Austin left the final word on any administrative action, such as reprimands or demotions, to two senior commanders — Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of the military’s Central Command, and Gen. Richard Clarke, head of the Special Operations Command.

Both officers found no grounds for penalizing any of the military personnel involved in the episode, the Pentagon official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss delicate personnel matters.

In two decades of war against shadowy enemies like al-Qaida and the Islamic State group, the U.S. military has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians by accident in war zones including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Somalia. And while the military sometimes accepts responsibility for an errant airstrike or a ground raid that harms civilians, rarely does it hold specific individuals accountable.

The most prominent recent exception to this trend happened in 2016, when the Pentagon disciplined at least a dozen military personnel for their roles in an airstrike in October 2015 on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, that killed 42 people. But none faced criminal charges.

Critics of the Kabul strike pointed to the incongruity of acknowledging the mistake but not finding anyone accountable for any wrongdoing.

“This decision is shocking,” said Steven Kwon, founder and president of Nutrition & Education International, the California-based aid organization that employed Zemari Ahmadi, the driver of a Toyota sedan that was struck by the U.S. drone. “How can our military wrongly take the lives of 10 precious Afghan people and hold no one accountable in any way?”

The acknowledgment of the mistaken strike came a week after a New York Times investigation of video evidence challenged assertions by the military that it had struck a vehicle carrying explosives meant for Hamid Karzai International Airport.

Public scrutiny into military strikes against shadowy adversaries like the Islamic State group and al-Qaida that also killed civilians is intensifying. Austin ordered last month a new high-level investigation into a U.S. airstrike in Syria that killed dozens of women and children in 2019, and claims that military officials tried to conceal it afterward.

On Sunday, an investigation by the New York Times revealed that a top- secret U.S. strike cell launched tens of thousands of bombs and missiles against the Islamic State group in Syria, but in the process of pounding a vicious foe, the commandos sidestepped safeguards and repeatedly killed civilians.

The higher-level inquiry into the Kabul strike by the Air Force’s inspector general, Lt. Gen. Sami Said, blamed a series of erroneous assumptions, made over the course of eight hours as U.S. officials tracked a white Toyota Corolla through the Afghan capital, for causing what he called “confirmation bias,” leading to the Aug. 29 attack.

Said, in releasing his findings last month, found no criminal wrongdoing but said any other errors warranting disciplinary action would be up to senior commanders. “You should not perceive the fact that I didn’t call any individual out with accountability,” Said told reporters. “That just does not mean that the chain of command won’t.” But it did not.

The general’s investigation made several recommendations for fixing the process through which strikes are ordered, including putting in new measures to cut down the risk of confirmation bias and reviewing the prestrike procedures used to assess the presence of civilians. Pentagon officials say they are now incorporating those measures into a broader strategy to prevent civilian harm on the battlefield.