Time for one last bloody act as drone tragedy marks US exit from Afghanistan

Editorial: The Taliban and its allies hardly needed to generate anti-western propaganda when, not for the first time, innocent civilians are killed by a catastrophic mistake

(Dave Simonds)

A tragedy in itself, the US drone attack that killed 10 innocent civilians in Afghanistan – one of the last acts of this long engagement – was a powerful reminder of the kind of catastrophic mistakes that so characterised what was, after all, a UN-sanctioned intervention with a humanitarian dimension.

Sadly, it came as no surprise. It was a typically vengeful hi-tech attack, and hardly the first that went tragically wrong. Ten members of a single extended family wiped out, including six children, with the youngest two years old.

The Taliban and their allies hardly needed to generate anti-western propaganda in circumstances such as these, and they occurred too often. Hardly the leaving gift America once might have wished for its mission.

All wars leave blameless victims and collateral damage behind, but they can be minimised. In a theatre such as Afghanistan, a hostile terrain with hostile guerrillas within, massive air superiority was never going to be sufficient to prevail.

In the weeks after the murderous 9/11 attacks, America lashed out; raining huge quantities of munitions into thinly populated regions, often as not killing civilians. “Daisy cutter” bombs – the most destructive of bombs aside from nuclear weapons – blew up mountains and goats, but the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden escaped all the same.

The final drone activity from the US was indeed the kind of “swift and forceful response” to Isis-K that the Biden administration promised – and the American public demanded – after the suicide bomb that took the lives of American service personnel and Afghan refugees. Like the Bush administration discovered before, mastery of the skies in asymmetric warfare is of limited use.

By the end of the Allied engagement, lessons had been learned and the authority, such as it was, of the Ghani government on the ground was supported by modest American air power and logistical support that were succeeding in holding the Taliban back, but the abrupt departure of western forces, a disaster planned by the Trump administration and implemented, clumsily, by the Biden White House has, as has been well noted, betrayed America’s own interests and the Afghan people.

The “peace deal” – that President Trump signed and President Biden stuck with – will not bring peace or end the suffering. That bereaved family won’t be the last to grieve.