Kabul drone strike killed an innocent aid worker and his family.

 

Destroyed vehicles at the site of the drone strike. New York Post/AFP/Getty.

The last military action in Kabul, Afghanistan by American forces is now reported to have killed an innocent aid worker and his family. New York Post. The man and nine of his children were killed in the drone strike. The United States claimed that they had bombed an ISIS bomber with a major secondary explosion. However, photos from the scene dispute that claim as the blast marks were not consistent with anything other than a hellfire missile. The man, Zemari Ahmadi, worked for a US based charity, Nutrition and Education International and was trying to get out of the country. Footage shows Ahmadi loading water into his vehicle and he and his fellow workers had laptops. It is believed that the incident was a case of a mistaken identity as a similar vehicle was used to launch a rocket attack on Kabul airport by ISIS.

My Comment:

The New York Time broke this story but unfortunately their work is behind a paywall. The New York Post will have to do as a source, but I was able to attach the above video. 

As for this incident, it seems clear that the military, and Joe Biden, screwed up badly here. The victims in this case seem totally innocent and are not the terrorists that the military claimed they are. Indeed, Zemari Ahmadi, seemed like a pretty decent man by Afghani standards. This didn't have to happen to him and his family. 

That isn't to say that these things are totally preventable. The fog of war is a real thing and occasionally innocent people die. That is part of warfare and things like this are always going to happen. Sometimes mistakes are made and people die. I don't think you can reduce these kinds of incidents to zero but this was still a bad incident. 

So why did this happen? It seems like a combination of mistaken identity and loosened rules of engagement. I think that they thought that this man and his vehicle were in the same car that ISIS was using. It was the same style and color and Ahmadi was seen loading water and laptops into the car. With the rules of engagement loosened that was all the military needed to launch a strike. 

Was that the right choice? I am not sure. Nobody wants to be the guy that wastes an innocent family but nobody also wants to be the guy that lets a terror attack happen. But I personally think that the rules of engagement were too loose in this case. Ahmadi wasn't an imminent threat to the operations at Kabul airport and he wasn't even approaching the airbase. It's hard to see the threat here and under normal circumstances I don't think this attack would have been made. But I think it was politics that caused this incident. 

The politics of this situation was pretty clear. The ISIS terror attack in Kabul was a huge embarrassment for the Biden administration. 13 US service members, 12 Marines and 1 Navy Corpsman died and Biden was criticized by everyone for further screwing up the Afghanistan pullout. Any further attacks would have caused further criticism so Biden ordered the military to do whatever they could. That led to the death of an Afghan family. 

Of course none of this had to happen. Had Biden actually planned for a withdrawal Mr Ahmadi and his family would still be alive. So would the 13 service members (and dozens of civilians and Taliban fighters) killed in the ISIS terror attack. The blood of these people is on the hands of Joe Biden and his utter failure in Afghanistan.