Neither Sen. Martin Heinrich nor Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, both Democrats from New Mexico, had any comment for the New Mexico Sun when asked if they planned to call for the Biden Administration to investigate the circumstances which led to the U.S. military targeting innocent civilians during last month’s drone strike in Kabul.
The strike killed 10 innocent Afghans, including several children, according to a U.S. Department of Defense release. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley initially called it a “righteous strike” against an “imminent threat;” however, the Pentagon has now stated that the attack was a “horrible mistake” amidst the frenzied military withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin released a statement saying they had believed that the target of the strike was a dangerous threat to U.S. service members and others at Hamid Karzai Airport, but that “we now know that there was no connection between Mr. (Zemari) Ahmadi and ISIS-Khorasan”.
Sen. Ben Ray Lujan had no comment when reached by the New Mexico Sun for a statement on the news that the U.S. military bombed civilians during last month’s drone strike in Kabul.
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Last week in the release, Austin admitted what the New York Times, along with other media organizations, had already reported: The drone stroke killed an Afghan U.S. aid worker and several nearby children, not an ISIS-K affiliate.
The Pentagon and several other sources have reported that Ahmani — the driver of the vehicle targeted — was an employee of an American established aid organization Nutrition and Education International and was no threat to U.S. forces.
Two statements issued by the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) on the day of the strike stated that the U.S. had executed a “self-defense unmanned over-the-horizon airstrike” against an automobile in Kabul which posed an “imminent ISIS-K threat.”
Once information circulated that the drone strike had taken the lives of several civilians, CENTCOM told the public they were “aware of reports of civilian casualties” and were “still assessing the results of this strike, which we know disrupted an imminent ISIS-K threat to the airport.”
Three days after the strike, Milley stood firm behind the reasons for the attack.
“We know from a variety of other means that at least one of those people that were killed was an ISIS facilitator,” he said during a press briefing. “At this point, we think that the procedures were correctly followed and it was a righteous strike.”
Last month, President Joe Biden stated that the strike in question was a prime example of his “over-the-horizon” counter terrorism strategy. In his statements on withdrawing from Afghanistan from the State Dining Room, the president told the American people of “what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities'' and that “we’ve shown that capacity just in the last week.” Biden claimed that the U.S. had “struck ISIS-K remotely, days after they murdered 13 of our service members and dozens of innocent Afghans.”
Axios reported that counterterrorism experts are questioning the worth of Biden’s “over-the-horizon” strategy, with one member of the intelligence community calling it the “over-the-rainbow” strategy, following the country's swift departure from Afghanistan.
