The Pentagon announced Monday that the nearly 20-year war in Afghanistan officially ended as the last U.S. Air Force planes departed the International airport at Kabul, but the days before the worst evacuation in the history of our country were marred with death from combat, the first in 18 months.
On Thursday, 13 U.S. military personnel -- 11 Marines, two Army soldiers, and a Navy corpsman -- were killed in a suicide bombing that didn't have to happen but did because we have generals who don't emulate Patton and Eisenhower anymore and are too afraid to tell a president "no sir, I'm not doing it that way and if you make me, I'll quit."
In the follow-up to that attack, Biden ordered counterstrikes against terrorist targets including a car full of suicide bombers headed back to the airport to kill more American troops and Afghan citizens, and it was that attack that led to even more needless death.
According to several reports, one of the missiles fired by a U.S. drone missed its target and instead slammed into an Afghan home, killing 10 people, seven of which were children, and burning them beyond all recognition.
CNN reported that the resulting deaths were definitely from a U.S. airstrike:
The US carried out a defensive airstrike in Kabul, targeting a suspected ISIS-K suicide bomber who posed an "imminent" threat to the airport, US Central Command said Sunday.
The youngest victims of Sunday's airstrike were two 2-year-old girls, according to family members.
Relatives found the remains of one of the girls, Malika, in the rubble near their home on Monday. A family member told CNN that it was unclear whether Malika had been inside the vehicle or in the compound when the strike hit.
The report quoted a brother of one those killed who said they were "an ordinary family."
"We are not ISIS or Daesh and this was a family home -- where my brothers lived with their families," he said, the Afghan reference to the Taliban.
During a funeral that was held later in the day, many of the family members shouted "Death to America," even as the Taliban that have retaken the country are bringing death to their own countrymen and women as well.
U.S. military officials acknowledged that the attack had taken place and that people who weren't supposed to have been targeted were killed.
"We are aware of reports of civilians casualties. We take these reports extremely seriously," said Army Maj. Gen. William Taylor of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a briefing to reporters.
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby added that the U.S. tries hard to avoid any civilian casualties (which are impossible to avoid in any war, by the way).
"We're investigating this. I'm not going to get ahead of it. But if we have significant -- verifiable information that we did take innocent life here, then we will be transparent about that, too. Nobody wants to see that happen," he said.
"But you know what else we didn't want to see happen. We didn't want to see happen what we believe to be a very real, a very specific and a very imminent threat to the Hamid Karzai International Airport and to our troops operating at the airport as well as civilians around it and in it and that is another thing that we were very concerned about," Kirby added.
U.S. Central Command, which oversaw the war in Afghanistan, put out a statement as well.
“We are aware of reports of civilian casualties following our strike on a vehicle in Kabul today,” CENTCOM said. “We are still assessing the results of this strike, which we know disrupted an imminent ISIS-K threat to the airport.
"We know that there were substantial and powerful subsequent explosions resulting from the destruction of the vehicle, indicating a large amount of explosive material inside that may have caused additional casualties," the statement added.
Other reports claimed that there were multiple people inside a vehicle that was filled with explosives, so it's possible those were what did most of the damage. But it is clear the U.S. targeting of the vehicle -- which had to happen in order to prevent yet another Biden-led catastrophe on American forces from taking place -- is what led to this outcome.
Americans who are glad to see our longest war end are not at all happy about the way Biden allowed it to end. If anyone deserves to be impeached, tried and convicted, it's him.
Sources include:
Please contact us for more information.