Pentagon investigation finds drone strike that left ten Afghan civilians dead, including seven children, was not 'unreasonable'
The US military claimed an August 29 drone strike successfully took out an imminent threat and defended the drone attack as a"righteous strike." Now an investigation finds while mistakes happened the military was not at fault.
“I found that given the information they had and the analysis that they did — I understand they reached the wrong conclusion, but ... was it reasonable to conclude what they concluded based on what they had? It was not unreasonable. It just turned out to be incorrect,” Said said. He is the inspector general of the Air Force and is considered independent as he had no direct connection to Afghanistan operations.
Said concluded that U.S. forces genuinely believed that the car they were following was an imminent threat and that they needed to strike it before it got closer to the airport. “According to the Inspector General, there was a mistake but no one acted wrongly, and I’m left wondering, how can that be?” Kwon said in a statement. “Clearly, good military intentions are not enough when the outcome is 10 precious Afghan civilian lives lost and reputations ruined.”
Those changes, he said, could “go a long way to greatly mitigate the risk of this happening again” in these types of rapidly moving, self-defense strikes.
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