Not a Tragic Mistake, a War Crime

Following a New York Times expose revealing that the drone strike against alleged ISIS-K militants in Kabul in fact targeted an aid worker and his family, and that all the victims were civilians, the Pentagon has admitted that they made a mistake.

This was not a mistake, it was deliberate.  Someone at very senior levels decided that they had to drone someone on the flimsiest of evidence to retaliate for the bombing at the Kabul airport.

It's kind of like kicking your cat because your boss chewed you out.

Both are immature, but only one kills children, and only one is a war crime:

The Pentagon acknowledged on Friday that the last U.S. drone strike before American troops withdrew from Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians, including seven children, after initially saying it had been necessary to prevent an attack on troops.

The extraordinary admission provided a horrific punctuation to the chaotic ending of the 20-year war in Afghanistan and will put President Biden and the Pentagon at the center of a growing number of investigations into how the administration and the military carried out Mr. Biden’s order to withdraw from the country.

Almost everything senior defense officials asserted in the hours, and then days, and then weeks after the Aug. 29 drone strike turned out to be false. The explosives the military claimed were loaded in the trunk of a white Toyota sedan struck by the drone’s Hellfire missile were probably water bottles, and a secondary explosion in the courtyard in a densely populated Kabul neighborhood where the attack took place was probably a propane or gas tank, officials said.

I would like to see some accountability.  Every officer who signed off on this action, and everyone who enabled this callous disregard for civilian life and the law of war, needs to be investigated, and prosecuted if the facts bear this out.

Of course, the people who should be prosecuted, General Officers and Colonels, won't be prosecuted.

At best they will find a junior officer, or a non-commissioned officer, to tie this to, and blame them, because that is how military justice (an oxymoron if there ever was one) works.

We just created another few dozen people who want to kill Americans.