Bernat Armangue/AP Photo
Amal Ahmadi holds a picture of his brother Zemari Ahmadi, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike last month in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Successive U.S. presidents have perpetuated a narrative around counterterrorism operations that describes them in almost clinical terms: Surgical strikes are able to cut the cancer of an imminent terrorist attack out of a society without harming the communities around it. But the idea that counterterrorism has few costs and can therefore be sustained indefinitely is a myth—one that is sustained by sanitized language, secrecy, and the lack of accountability around civilian deaths resulting from U.S. operations abroad.
The presumed “precision” and the ability to stop an imminent terrorist attack without putting U.S. forces on the ground has made drone strikes appealing to policymakers. They are pitched as maximally effective and minimally costly. “We have what’s called over-the-horizon capabilities, which means we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground,” President Biden noted on August 31 as he declared the war in Afghanistan over. “We’ve shown that capacity just in the last week.” But a drone strike two days earlier had actually killed ten Afghan civilians in a densely populated neighborhood, including the driver of the car, longtime aid worker Zemari Ahmadi, and seven children.
The secrecy surrounding drone strikes means that the consequences for civilians rarely enter the political conversation.
It was the clearest example yet that the global war on terrorism has been sustained by deploying sanitized language to elide the harm it has caused. In this shorthand, “over-the-horizon” implies low cost; “targeted killing” suggests that all drone strikes are accurate. The military said that Ahmadi’s vehicle had an improvised explosive device inside; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley had called it a “righteous strike.” The strike was framed as both precise and costless: In a perverse facsimile of the “trolley problem,” it promised to save lives with few risks for civilians or U.S. service members. The problem with this explanation, as we now know thanks to journalists and an Afghan family’s own call for accountability, is that it was false.
All too often, civilian deaths that occur during counterterrorism operations go unreported and uninvestigated, meaning too often the costs to civilians are not accounted for. It was very unusual when the Pentagon acknowledged on Friday that the strike was a “tragic mistake” and ordered an investigation. The U.S. military often fails to account for civilian deaths incurred during operations, leading to systematic undercounting.
The secrecy surrounding drone strikes means that the consequences for civilians rarely enter the political conversation. In Yemen, for example, U.S. military support for the Saudi-led coalition has rightfully drawn a great deal of scrutiny in recent years from a political coalition of Democrats and independents like Rep. Ro Khanna and Sen. Chris Murphy and Bernie Sanders, and Republicans like Sens. Todd Young and Mike Lee. In contrast, the civilian costs of U.S. counterterrorism operations in Yemen, seen by U.S. policymakers as a separate and parallel conflict to the Saudi-led coalition’s war with the Houthis, remain relatively underexamined.
Drawing a bright line between the Saudi-led coalition’s intervention and U.S. counterterrorism operations in Yemen, the 2019 bill passed by Congress directing the end of U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition specifically stated that it “shall not affect any military operations directed at Al Qaeda.” (In any case, Trump vetoed the bill.) In the opening days of the Trump administration, a special-operations raid on Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula killed at least 14 civilians, including nine children, and one U.S. service member; it illustrated the civilian harm that such counterterrorism operations can create.
The number of U.S. drone and airstrikes in Yemen rose sharply under both the Obama and Trump administrations. The nonprofit monitor Airwars estimates that U.S. counterterrorism airstrikes in Yemen have killed between 76 and 154 civilians, though official U.S. sources put that number at just 13. That discrepancy may relate to the fact that internal military investigations are inconsistent and often rely on internal records, only rarely collecting “information from witnesses or survivors of attacks or by visiting the site of strikes.”
NGOs and media outlets that report on civilian casualties are often working with incomplete information under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. A conservative count from the Yemen Data Project reports that at least 8,773 civilians have been killed in coalition airstrikes since March 2015, and the war itself has caused at least an estimated 250,000 deaths and generated the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.
It’s not so much that war has become more humane: Rather, the true costs of the U.S. military-first approach to the world, both for Americans and for the people who live in countries that are targeted, are largely hidden. Consider this: 6,922 U.S. military personnel, 7,567 U.S. contractors, and 21 Defense Department non-uniformed personnel lost their lives in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Some critics of Biden’s decision to remove the last U.S. troops from Afghanistan cited “a low sustainable cost” of keeping an American presence in the country. But casualty levels for Afghans themselves, of course, were never sustainable, and certainly not in recent years: The U.N. reported 47 percent more Afghan civilian casualties in the first six months of 2021, compared to the previous year—and data from the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project showed that the Afghanistan war was already “the deadliest conflict in the world” in 2020.
Perhaps the August 29 drone strike will encourage more transparency and accountability about U.S. counterterrorism operations around the world. Or perhaps “over-the-horizon” strikes will continue in darkness.