Mistakes were made, but no one did anything wrong.
No one will be held accountable.
This is the result of the Air Force's investigation last week into the drone strike that President Joe Biden authorized. The strike, one of several measures taken to distract the public from the completely incompetent withdrawal of U.S. military personnel from Afghanistan, turned out to target an innocent aid worker and nine others with no apparent terrorist ties, including multiple children. The drone footage shows that the children were visible two minutes before the missile. The excuse offered by Inspector General Sami Said was that it was "100% not obvious" that there were children there. "You have to be like, no kidding looking for it."
"No kidding" — you know, the way you might look for things around a target before launching a missile.
If nobody committed any criminal acts in the course of this appalling incident, neither acts of malicious indifference toward human life nor even of criminal negligence, then that raises even more serious questions about the way the U.S. armed forces operate overseas.
Are the procedures for planning an assassination like this one really so flimsy and the planners so careless that a completely innocent aid worker and a group of children can get droned without anyone even having done anything wrong? Is the public, in whose name the Biden administration committed this war crime, really to believe that drone operators are as careless about the potential for hidden and innocent bystanders on a scene as this incident would make it appear?
The most damning conclusion to be drawn from this incident, and from this investigation, is that President Biden's policy of a so-called "over the horizon" approach to managing terrorism in Afghanistan is itself negligence. Not to say that the United States had to remain in Afghanistan forever, but this incident makes it abundantly clear that the military and intelligence services cannot manage the terrorism problem in Afghanistan and should not try to do so without a physical presence there.
Biden's incompetent and unaccountable administration is doing incalculable damage right now to America's image around the world. This barbaric attack has probably created an entirely new generation of Afghan terrorists who hate America. His chaotic retreat from Afghanistan made the U.S. appear unreliable and ineffective, but this drone strike leaves the impression of blind rage, cruelty, and cowardice as well.
Biden's administration, having thus doubly damaged America's standing in the world, appears set to continue its standard practice of not holding anyone accountable for even the most appalling and consequential errors. To this day, no heads have rolled over the withdrawal, and this report virtually guarantees that this crime will go unpunished.
As a point of comparison, it is worth noting that after the incident at Abu Ghraib, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld offered twice to resign, despite having no personal involvement in the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners of war. Although his resignation was refused by President George W. Bush, he had volunteered to fall on his sword because he knew there had to be accountability and that this had happened on his watch. He was ashamed by what had been done under him. Even then, at least some inadequate semblance of justice was served when multiple abusers went to military prison for their crimes.
This time, innocents and children were actually murdered in what was supposed to be a careful and well-calculated retaliatory strike. As usual with Biden, it appears that no one will be held accountable at all, not even a little bit.