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| Kabul airstrike was deadly mistake. |
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The United States admits it fucked up. They used a drone and it struck a vehicle with children.
An aid worker and seven children were killed in a drone strike near Kabul. The U.S. has admitted fault and they are investigating why they got it wrong.
The United States military investigation into a deadly Kabul drone strike on a vehicle in August has found it killed 10 civilians and the driver and that the vehicle targeted was likely not a threat associated with ISIS-K, announced Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top general of US Central Command, at the Pentagon on Friday.
McKenzie told reporters that the strike -- which he said killed seven children -- was a "mistake" and offered an apology.
"This strike was taken in the earnest belief that it would prevent an imminent threat to our forces and the evacuees at the airport, but it was a mistake and I offer my sincere apology," he said.
McKenzie added that he is "fully responsible for this strike and this tragic outcome."
The Pentagon's announcement will likely fuel more criticism of the Biden administration's chaotic evacuation of Kabul and handling of the withdrawal from Afghanistan more broadly. While McKenzie stressed Friday that future strikes will likely be held to a higher standard, confirmation of the civilian death toll also provides insight into the obstacles ahead for military and intelligence officials tasked with fulfilling President Joe Biden's promise to make the terror group "pay" for its deadly suicide attack in Kabul.
The Pentagon had maintained that at least one ISIS-K facilitator and three civilians were killed in what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley had previously called a "righteous strike" on the compound on August 29. The investigation released Friday found that all of those killed in the residential compound were civilians.
In the lead up to the strike, drone operators surveilled the courtyard for up to 4 to 5 minutes. In that time, a male driver left the vehicle. One child was parking the vehicle and other children were present in the car and the courtyard -- as CNN had been told by the Ahmadi family.
The military based the strike on a reasonable certainty standard to launch the strike on the vehicle. Tragically, it was the wrong vehicle, a US military official familiar with the investigation told CNN earlier Friday, adding that reasonable certainty is not 100% certainty.
"We didn't take the strike because we thought we were wrong -- we took the strike because we thought we had a good target," McKenzie said. While he acknowledged that the strike "was a terrible mistake," he said he would "not qualify the entire operation" as a failure.
Asked by a reporter to explain how the "complete and utter failure" could have occurred, McKenzie said, "While I agree that this strike certainly did not come up to our standards and I profoundly regret it, I would not qualify the entire operation in those terms."
Previously, US Central Command pointed to "significant secondary explosions" as evidence of a "substantial amount of explosive material" in the vehicle. On Friday, the US military source said that after reviewing footage from infra-red sensors, they would no longer characterize this as an explosion -- instead, it was more of a flare up.
The US official said that in the time leading up to the strike, the US had at least 60 different intelligence reports about threat streams toward US forces at Hamid Karzai International Airport.
A US official with direct knowledge of the standards for a strike of this nature told CNN earlier this month that 10 civilian deaths is an "astronomically high" number and the military would have conducted collateral damage estimates beforehand, meaning commanders were aware that there was a potential for civilian casualties.
"Had we cooperation with any local partner, we would have never fired a missile at the vehicle but tried to get to the drivers before they got in the car," one former intelligence official with knowledge of how these strikes are carried out previously told CNN. "That assumes we had intel on the car as opposed to the people, and maybe after it was already in route, which leaves far fewer options."
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