On September 18, 2021, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the Pentagon in Washington retreated from its defense of a drone strike that killed multiple civilians in Afghanistan the prior month, announcing that a review revealed that only civilians were killed in the attack, not an Islamic State extremist as first believed.
“The strike was a tragic mistake,” Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of US Central Command, told a Pentagon news conference. McKenzie apologized for the error and said the United States is considering making reparation payments to the victims' families.
He said the decision to strike a white Toyota Corolla sedan, after having tracked it for about eight hours, was made in an “earnest belief” – based on a standard of “reasonable certainty” – that it posed an imminent threat to American forces at Kabul airport. The car was believed to have been transporting explosives in its trunk, he said.
For days after the August 29 strike, Pentagon officials asserted that it had been conducted correctly despite ten civilians being killed, including seven children.
News organizations later raised doubts about that version of events, reporting that the driver of the targeted vehicle was a longtime employee at an American humanitarian organization and citing an absence of evidence to support the Pentagon’s assertion that the car contained explosives.
The airstrike was the last of a US war that ended as it had begun in 2001 – with the Taliban in power in Kabul. “Clearly, our intelligence was wrong on this particular white Toyota Corolla,” Mackenzie said. In a written statement, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized for what he called “a horrible mistake.”
“In a dynamic high-threat environment, the commanders on the ground had appropriate authority and had reasonable certainty that the target was valid, but after deeper post-strike analysis, our conclusion is that innocent civilians were killed,” then-US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley added.
Addressing initial mistakes
Amnesty International, the humanitarian aid group, called the US military’s admission of a mistake a good first step.
For the record, the US president at the time was none other than Joe Biden, the same president who was so “outraged” at what happened here with the deaths of the seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) workers that it caused him to give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “dressing down” over the issue.
While we will be forever indebted to President Biden and the US for our unwavering support during this war, it is paternal support—not a case of sibling assisting sibling. When it's paternal, if you step out of line in the eyes of the “father,” you get “dressed down.”
TO ADD further perspective, according to research by the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, the post-9/11 US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan took a tremendous human toll on those countries.
As of September 2021, an estimated 432.093 civilians in these countries had died violent deaths as a result of the wars. As of May 2023, an estimated 3.6-3.8 million people had died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones. The total death toll in these war zones could be at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting, although the precise death toll remains unknown.
Most likely, although the mistake in Kabul occurred less than three years ago, my guess is that very few people other than the affected families remember the details today.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Indeed, the parallels to the tragedy that occurred here in Israel with the inadvertent killing of seven members of WCK who were involved in much-needed humanitarian work – encouraged and supported by the Israeli government – are eerily similar.
Because this is war, and in war zones, as both the US said at the time about Afghanistan and our leadership said about those deaths in Gaza, mistakes happen. They should not happen, we wish they would not happen, it is truly terrible that they do happen, but happen they do.
Yet in 2021, there was no worldwide outrage, no call for a special Security Council Session to censure the United States, no call to boycott America, but rather an overall acceptance that the price of war is high and, sadly, sometimes civilians are left to pay the bill.
But here, the situation involved Israelis (read: Jews) who were the ones responsible – and the world certainly loves to blame Jews for all of its ills. After all, we are so easy to hate.
Rabbi David Wolpe, Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Sinai in Los Angeles, now at Boston’s Harvard University for the year, addressed this issue in a talk at the university’s Divinity School in March. He mentioned how easy it is for people to hate Jews.
To use his words, “If you hate socialists, you can hate Jews; if you hate capitalists, you can hate Jews; if you hate communists, you can hate Jews.” It is almost as if we are the world’s unifying factor.
We are even a unifying factor in the Arab world. The 22 Arab countries in this part of the world do not get along very well, but the one thing that unites them is that they don’t like Jews.
It does not appear that the world wants to accept the fact that we are fighting a war in our defense, a war we did not start, nor did we like, with an enemy that on October 6 actually had most of what it is now demanding of us but really wanted to kill Jews, so it attacked.
They really wanted to scare us sufficiently so that we would pack up and leave. And if need be, they would be willing to do so again and again until they rid this small corner of planet Earth of every last one of us. That fact should outrage the world and give meaning to the words “never again.”
Until that outrage is properly directed, we will never be safe and must always be ready to defend ourselves and our land.
The writer, who has lived in Israel for 40 years, is the founder and board chair of Atid EDI Ltd., an international business development consultancy; the founder and chair of the American State Offices Association; the former national president of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel (AACI); and the past chairperson of the board of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.