We humans all have cognitive biases, systematic thinking errors that lead us to make mistakes in judgment.
And the mother of all such thinking errors is one you have no doubt heard of, namely “confirmation bias,” the natural tendency to accept information that is compatible with our existing beliefs while disregarding or rejecting contradictory or contrary facts.
A Pentagon investigation of the Aug. 29 U.S. drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 Afghan civilians, including three men and seven children, found no person to blame for what was initially called “a righteous strike” and later “a tragic mistake.”
The culprit, a three-star Air Force general concluded, was the pernicious effect of confirmation bias. The U.S. military was in the final day of its evacuation of Afghans from Kabul and on high alert, following the deadly suicide attack three days earlier that killed 13 American troops and 170 Afghan civilians at the airport gate.
The strike cell responsible for launching a Hellfire missile from an MQ-9 Reaper drone at an innocent man had been briefed on multiple streams of intelligence from both human sources and intercepted communications.
All indicated that ISIS-K was planning another mass casualty attack at the airport. U.S. drones tracked a number of suspect vehicles in a desperate search for the bomber.
“We had over 60 very, very high-caliber reports of an imminent threat to our forces in and around Kabul,” Gen. Frank McKenzie, commander of the U.S. Central Command, said at a Pentagon briefing.
The movement of one vehicle drew particular scrutiny: a white Toyota Corolla, a sedan model ubiquitous in Kabul, that had stopped near what was believed to be an ISIS base of operations.
“We selected this car based on its movement at a known targeted area of interest to us, and we followed it throughout the day,” McKenzie said.
From that point on, confirmation bias kicked in. For eight hours, each action of the driver, Zemari Ahmadi, a worker for a U.S. aid group, was interpreted as evidence he was closing in for a strike.
Ahmadi was observed loading what could have been explosives into the trunk of his car. They were actually containers full of water.
As he dropped off co-workers on his way home, Ahmadi edged closer to the airport. It turns out that was where his house was. Under enormous pressure to prevent another horrific attack, with time running short, and convinced Ahmadi was alone, the commander of the strike cell pulled the trigger, unleashing a single Hellfire missile from the MQ-9 Reaper, killing Ahmadi in his car and members of his family who had run out to greet him.
“It was a mistake. It was an honest mistake,” said Lt. Gen. Sami Said, the Air Force’s inspector general, who found no one criminally negligent after an exhaustive internal investigation. “Individuals involved in this strike, interviewed during this investigation, truly believed at the time that they were targeting an imminent threat to U.S. forces.”
Countering confirmation bias requires keeping an open mind to other interpretations of the available evidence and the time to consider it properly.
“You don’t have the luxury of time when you’re perceiving something to be an imminent threat that’s approaching you,” Said explained at a November briefing. “When you’re getting that volume of data, you’re tracking so many threat streams. This confirmation bias thing starts to build: You’re trying to interpret things the best you can, and you don’t have time.”
When news reports began to suggest only innocents were killed, the initial response from the U.S. Central Command was to point the finger at what it described as “substantial and powerful subsequent explosions … indicating a large amount of explosive material inside that may have caused additional casualties.”
That was yet another example of confirmation bias, seeing what is expected and jumping to an erroneous conclusion. “We know that there were secondary explosions,” Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said four days after the strike. “Because there were secondary explosions, there’s a reasonable conclusion to be made that there were explosives in that vehicle.”
Reasonable, but wrong, and an example of how once an initial judgment is made, it’s human nature to be slow to admit a mistake. No evidence was found of explosives in the vehicle, and it’s possible that what was perceived as secondary explosions may have been from propane tanks stored nearby. “Mistakes do happen in military operations,” Said said, but for him, the critical question was, “Were the interpretations at the time reasonable based on the information that they had?”
Had the U.S. strike cell had more time to gather intelligence about the suspect, say over days and week instead of hours, and more time to engage in what’s called a red team exercise, in which a neutral party can raise questions about the initial conclusions, the result may have been different.
But given the time constraint and the high stakes, Said doesn’t see anything that was missed that would have prompted second thoughts.
“We can’t second-guess with additional information that they didn’t have, although I did look at that to see if there was something they should have had that they didn’t have,” he said. “There’s not much of that that would have made a difference.”
The investigation resulted in classified recommendations to better recognize and account for confirmation bias, but overthinking carries its own risk of inaction.
“Just think about if this was a real threat and it did kill U.S. forces on [Hamid Karzai International Airport] and the folks involved didn’t do anything about it,” he said. “We might be investigating them today, so it’s a tough scenario to be in.”
Said’s bottom line is that while the mistake was tragic and regrettable, it’s not criminal or negligent.
Last month, the Pentagon closed the book on the case when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin accepted commanders’ recommendations that no one be punished or prosecuted for the deadly mistake.
“I do not anticipate there being issues of personal accountability to be had with respect to the Aug. 29 airstrike,” said John Kirby, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
