Flawed Kabul strike wasn’t illegal: Pentagon

KABUL (Pajhwok): The Pentagon insists a US drone strike that killed 10 Afghan civilians in Kabul in August was an honest mistake and now the Pentagon has claimed that the strike was legal.

Coming two weeks after the Taliban seized power, the August 29 drone strike had been conducted in a residential area of the capital.

US officials had then claimed that ISIS-K militants were the target of the attack. But they acknowledged later on that the strike had actually killed civilians.

On Wednesday, the Pentagon claimed that even though the strike killed civilians, not Daesh fighters, it was not illegal.

“The investigation found no violation of law, including the law of war,” Lieutenant General Sami Said, the inspector general for the US Air Force, said in a report.

WION quoted him as saying: “Execution errors combined with confirmation bias and communication breakdowns led to regrettable civilian casualties.”

The official, who characterised the strike as an honest mistake, maintained no criminal conduct, random conduct or negligence was behind the flawed raid.

At that time, he said, the team believed the house was empty and there were no children in the compound, but their assessment turned out to be wrong.

“What likely broke down was not the intelligence but the correlation of that intelligence to a specific house,” the air force official opined.

A grave mistake on the part of the team was not finding the right car, he admitted. “We actually never ended up tracking the actual Toyota Corolla.”

According to the Pentagon review, execution errors, confirmation bias and communication breakdowns could have led to the flawed strike.

PAN Monitor/mud