A Pentagon investigation that found a drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 Afghan civilians was an “honest mistake” and recommended no legal or disciplinary action has been met with widespread outrage from Congress and human rights groups.
Critics said the report contributed to a culture of impunity and failed to address systemic problems in the US conduct of drone warfare, making future civilian casualties inevitable.
The victims of the 29 August strike included Zemari Ahmadi, who worked for a US-based aid organisation, and nine members of his family, including seven children.
Even though the investigation by the US Air Force inspector general, Lt Gen Sami Said, found that the drone operators had confused a white Toyota Corolla at the scene with a car linked to a terrorist group and also failed to spot a child visible in surveillance footage two minutes before the strike, it found no evidence of wrongdoing.
“The investigation found no violation of law, including the law of war. Execution errors combined with confirmation bias and communication breakdowns led to regrettable civilian casualties,” the report said.
“It was an honest mistake,” Said told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday. “But it’s not criminal conduct, random conduct, negligence”, said the high-pressure conditions surrounding the strike, and fear of an imminent attack on Kabul airport by Islamic State, contributed to the mistake.
The report also said “confirmation bias” was a factor. The drone operators saw what they expected to see, assuming the white Toyota in their sights was the same as the one they had been tracking, even though it is one of the most common cars in Afghanistan.
The youngest of the Ahmadi children killed in the attack was two years old. The failure to recommend any legal or disciplinary actions drew immediate allegations of impunity in the US military.
“When there is no accountability for a mistake this grave and this costly, it sends a message all the way through the command structure that the killing of civilians is just an ordinary cost of war,” the Democratic senator Chris Murphy said on Twitter. “This is unacceptable.”
Marc Garlasco, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who is now a military adviser to a Dutch peace organisation, Pax, said the high-pressure conditions should not be used as an excuse for the blunders. “Stop saying you were under pressure. The Afghans live that every day,” he said.
Adil Haque, a Rutgers University law professor who writes extensively on the law and ethics of war, said that a fundamental problem underlying the repeated civilian casualty incidents from drone strikes was the US refusal to ratify or adopt the first additional protocol to the Geneva conventions from 1977, which dealt with the protection of victims of armed conflicts.
The protocol says warring parties have a duty to verify that people they are targeting are not civilians.
The US military only acknowledges a duty to take feasible precautions in “good faith” to avoid civilian casualties.
“You shouldn’t just be asking: are their movements consistent with the hypothesis that they are an Isis operative? You want to ask: is any of this inconsistent with them just being an innocent civilian driving a Toyota Corolla?” Haque said.
“Because the US does not expressly adopt that principle, it lends itself to this unstructured collection and analysis of information that’s not asking the right questions.”
Steven Kwon, a co-founder and the president of Nutrition and Education International, Ahmadi’s employer, said: “This investigation is deeply disappointing and inadequate because we’re left with many of the same questions we started with.
I do not understand how the most powerful military in the world could follow Zemari, an aid worker, in a commonly used car for eight hours, and not figure out who he was, and why he was at a US aid organisation’s headquarters.”
Hina Shamsi, the director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “The inspector general’s main findings of error, confirmation bias, and communication breakdowns are all too common with US lethal strikes, and his recommendations do not remedy the tremendous harm here or the likelihood that it will happen again.”
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