Yesterday, The New York Times published a report on the US military’s investigation into the Aug. 29, 2021 US drone attack in Kabul in the chaotic final days of the US evacuation from Afghanistan,based on a US Central Command investigative report that the Times acquired by via Freedom of Information Act request, though with redactions.
The drone strike came three days after the ISIS attack on the main gate of the Kabul airport that killed 13 US troops and dozens of Afghanis. US military officials claimed for days afterwards that their strike prevented another ISIS attack on the airport, but were forced to admit about ten days later that, in fact, the ten victims of the attack were all civilians, among them Zemari Ahmadi, a well known aid worker, and seven children.
What the investigation showed was that military analysts suspected within 20 minutes of the drone strike that civilians had died in it and knew definitively within three hours that civilians, including at least three children, had been killed. And yet, publicly, officials all the way up the chain of command, up to and including Generals Kenneth McKenzie, then US Central Command chief and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley lied about it for days, until McKenzie finally admitted that indeed the news reporting was correct and that only civilians had been killed.
Shamsi, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer representing families of victims, told the Times that the investigation “makes clear that military personnel saw what they wanted to see and not reality, which was an Afghan aid worker going about his daily life.”
