US acknowledged 'tragic mistake' in Kabul drone strike. Experts fear it won't be the last under Biden

WASHINGTON – Civilian casualties, like the deaths of 10 people in Kabul in a botched U.S. drone strike, are likely to continue under the Biden administration's "over the horizon" policy of attacking suspected terrorists from a distance, according to experts and based on a Pentagon report.

Hundreds of civilians have been killed in U.S. airstrikes in recent years, according to Pentagon figures, in the same regions from Africa to Afghanistan that will be targeted under the Biden administration's "over the horizon" approach, which will rely on long-range drones and other aircraft to strike targets in Afghanistan and other global hot spots.

Gathering the intelligence to target those terrorists and avoid killing civilians has become more difficult with the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and limited deployments of American forces elsewhere, said Seth Jones, director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. U.S. commanders previously had been able to tap local sources for information on suspected terrorists, developing patterns of life before striking.

"Ideally you want your own eyes on the target," Jones said. "You want to know what color his underwear is, and what he brushes his teeth with."

A potential problem with the tactic: Terrorists will surround themselves with civilians, knowing that U.S. forces are loath to kill innocent people.

In testimony to the Senate on Tuesday, the top commander in the Middle East acknowledged that targeting terrorists has become more challenging.

"As we go forward in our ability to create what we call the ecosystem that allows you to see what's going on in the ground ... (it's) going to get a lot harder to do that – particularly in places like Afghanistan," said Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, chief of U.S. Central Command.

Dynamic vs. deliberate targets

The problem is particularly acute in what the military refers to as "dynamic" targets. Those are suspected terrorists believed to pose an imminent threat to U.S. troops or interests. "Deliberate" targets are those that are struck after a long period of surveillance and various forms of intelligence that could include informants and intercepted communication.

The tragic error in the Kabul strike is an example of a dynamic target, said Scott Murray, a retired Air Force intelligence colonel. Murray helped develop targets for the initial strikes against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria and had deployments to Afghanistan. Over-the-horizon targeting can compensate for the lack of informants by fusing intercepted communications, high-definition video and other imagery for deliberate targets, he said.

The 10 people, including seven children, killed in Kabul by a Hellfire missile fired by a Reaper drone proves the limitation of relying on those streams of intelligence for dynamic targets. Military commanders who ordered the strike were outside Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon. The strike came days after terrorists of a self-proclaimed affiliate of the Islamic State called ISIS-K killed 13 U.S. troops and 170 Afghan civilians outside Hamid Karzai International Airport.

Military officials initially assessed that the strike had killed at least one suspected suicide bomber and no civilians. Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hailed it as “righteous.” Part of the assessment came from an explosion after a white Toyota Corolla had been struck by the missile. A second explosion had been thought to be caused by explosives in the car, but further investigation determined the explosion had been caused by a propane tank that had been on the ground.

"It's the dynamic targeting that will suffer the most," Murray said. "The situation on the ground is never as it seems from the air.”

What 'over the horizon' may mean in practice

Lacking human sources of intelligence on the ground, the military relies on video from drones and intercepted communications to identify targets. More than 60 pieces of intelligence and imagery from several Reaper drones led to the wrong conclusion and the Kabul strike, according to the military.

"When you rely on imagery, you can make huge mistakes," Jones said.

Those mistakes probably will result in civilians being killed, he said. It's unclear how such mistakes will affect U.S. standing among its allies and adversaries.

"There's so little studied on this," Jones said. "It's a problem that I'm not sure the U.S. government has done any serious analysis on – what the impact of the civilian casualties has been."

Another possibility is that, lacking good intelligence from human sources, commanders will take fewer shots at suspected terrorists, said retired Maj. Gen. Mark Quantock, who was the top intelligence officer for Central Command.

Lethal targeting requires positive identification of the suspected terrorist, he said. Without solid intelligence, you usually don't take the shot. Terrorists can also be aware that U.S. forces are reluctant to fire on targets surrounded by children, women and other bystanders.

"I can recall many missions where we waved off out of concern for CIVCAS," he said, referring to the military shorthand for civilian casualties. "It's a very important consideration for U.S. military operations. The bad guys figured this out pretty quick – so we'd often see them staying close to kids and women. They weren't dumb."

Iraq, Syria hit hardest in recent years

Pentagon officials said the drone strike in Afghanistan on Aug. 29 was a tragic mistake and have launched several investigations to determine what went wrong. Yet the Pentagon's own accounting shows deaths and injuries to civilians in places like Syria and Iraq have occurred with alarming frequency in recent years.

The annual report, released last month, noted that the toll continues to change as investigators sort through claims from years ago. The report cites 2017 as a particularly bloody year for civilians in airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. It found 200 reports of civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria that year as "credible." The attacks killed 892 civilians and wounded 232, according to Michael Howard, a Pentagon spokesman.

Three of the airstrikes in 2017 killed more than 10 people, according to the report. The worst occurred on Jan. 6, 2017, when 16 civilians were killed and three wounded in an attack that targeted suspected Islamic State terrorists. The toll of 892 civilians dead coincided with a policy that accepted more civilian casualties as a result of efforts to fight Islamic State terrorists, a change made during the Obama administration and accelerated after President Donald Trump announced he would "take the gloves off" in prosecuting the war.

Civilian casualties dropped dramatically in 2020, according to the report.

The decline to 23 civilians killed and 10 wounded in U.S. attacks in 2020 came as the U.S.-led air war and local ground forces took back virtually all the ground that Islamic State fighters had seized in Iraq and Syria beginning in 2014.

US allots $3 million a year for civilian casualty payouts

U.S. commanders also take precautions that routinely go beyond requirements in the law of war to protect civilians, Howard said. When civilians have been killed or wounded, the Pentagon has offered payments to families. In Iraq and Afghanistan, there have been more than 15,000 payouts.

There were payments of $259,899 during fiscal year 2020 and $858,240 in 2019, Howard said.

Congress in 2020 authorized a fund that allots $3 million a year to be used for payments for civilian casualties. The Pentagon also is developing a first-of-its-kind policy to address harm done to civilians by U.S. attacks, Howard said.

"We recognize that our military operations do result in civilian suffering," Howard said in a statement. "It is important that we have the right policies and processes in place to appropriately assess and respond when civilian harm occurs, and we continue to actively examine how we can improve our approaches to doing so."

ISIS-K, al-Qaida, al-Shabab

In an address to the United Nations last week, President Joe Biden sought to move beyond the expensive, grinding wars of the past two decades since the 9/11 terror attacks.

"I stand here today for the first time in 20 years with the United States not at war,” Biden said. “We’ve turned the page.”

The next chapter, however, will continue to record U.S. attacks on suspected terrorists, albeit from a distance. In recent weeks, the Pentagon has struck an al-Qaida leader near Idlib, Syria, and al-Shabab fighters near Cammaara, Somalia. Military officials judged that no civilians were harmed in the airstrikes.

Syria and Somalia are among the countries where U.S. attacks on extremist groups probably will continue, Jones said. Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen are others.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Afghanistan drone strike stirs fear of civilian deaths under Biden