Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin agreed with a watchdog report that found no illegality in the U.S. military’s botched Afghanistan strike that killed 10 civilians.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed on Thursday that Austin had “concurred” with the Air Force inspector general’s findings that there was no criminal conduct in the errant missile fire on Aug. 29.
U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Sami D. Said, the inspector general, affirmed the Department of Defense’s admission that the target of the strike, an aid worker named Zemari Ahmadi, had no terror connections, he told reporters on Wednesday to outline his findings.
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He did not “find violations of law or the law of war” or any “individual that failed to perform to the level of … criminal misconduct or criminal negligence,” though he also “didn’t eliminate the possibility of accountability.”
Austin “concurs with the findings of General Said,” Kirby said during Thursday’s briefing, adding, “That would include concurring with General Said’s finding that there was no violation of the law of war and that there was no criminal misconduct here.”
The Aug. 29 drone strike killed Ahmadi and nine others, including multiple children, some of whom were visible in the military’s footage two minutes before the strike was launched, though they were not seen at the time of the strike, Said told reporters on Wednesday.
The children “at the two-minute time frame” before the missile launched were “100% not obvious. You have to be like no kidding looking for it, but when you’re looking for it certainly after the fact, if you asked me [if] there was evidence of a presence, yes, there was,” Said explained.
Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., commander of U.S. Central Command, announced on Sept. 17 that Ahmadi had been cleared of terrorist ties, calling the strike “a mistake” with a “tragic outcome.” The admission came weeks after news outlets reported civilian casualties.
One of the biggest problems Said found was with how the strike was launched with “confirmation bias.”
“One of the recommendations that goes to this issue, central to this issue, is red teaming, if you will, to break confirmation bias by somebody going you can interpret the intelligence in a way that leads you to further believe that this is the vehicle of interest, but you can also interpret it as benign,” Said said. “There were instances where the intelligence was being correlated to real-time information or what was being observed in a way that we could have had a chance to inject and go, ‘What else could this be? I know you could interpret it this way, but what about this?’”
Said explained that this “actually happened during the eight-hour window” when they tracked Ahmadi’s car before launching the missile attack.
The inspector general ultimately recommended they should implement procedures to “mitigate the risks of confirmation bias,” enhance “sharing of overall situational awareness during execution,” and review “pre-strike procedures” as they relate to the presence of civilians, according to a readout provided to reporters, which Kirby said Austin has endorsed.
The strike was conducted while the United States was on the verge of concluding their noncombatant evacuation operation in Afghanistan at the end of the 20-year war that claimed the lives of approximately 3,500 American and allied troops, including 13 U.S. service members who were killed days earlier.
An ISIS-K operative, Abdul Rehman al-Loghri, who was previously held at Bagram Prison but was subsequently released by the Taliban when they assumed control of Afghanistan, detonated a suicide device at the gates of Hamid Karzai International Airport, where the evacuations were taking place, killing an additional 170 civilians.
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There had been intelligence to indicate an attack was “highly likely” both before and after the U.S.’s botched strike.
The U.S. and allied countries were able to evacuate roughly 120,000 people during the final two weeks of August, more than half of which have made their way to the U.S.
