Three of the United States’ top military leaders appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this week to testify in their first public briefings since the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, and the Commander of U.S. Central Command General Kenneth McKenzie faced questions on topics ranging from the recommendations they made to the president to details regarding the suicide bombing at Kabul International airport that killed thirteen U.S. service members and more than 170 Afghans. However, they spent little time addressing the misguided drone strike that wrongfully killed an innocent Afghan family and broader questions regarding the reliability and accountability of U.S. drone strike policies.

On August 29, the United States conducted what would be its final drone attack of the twenty-year war in Afghanistan. After hours of surveillance, a tactical Air Force commander, under the orders of McKenzie, launched an MQ-9 Reaper drone’s Hellfire missile at a car being driven by a man suspected to be transporting an ISIS bomb. In the wake of the attack, the Biden administration swiftly declared it to be a victorious feat of counterterrorism. Milley described it a “righteous strike.”

Days later, however, New York Times investigative journalists revealed that the driver was not an ISIS collaborator, but rather a longtime employee of a U.S. aid organization in Kabul. Zemari Ahmadi, the target of the strike, was an Afghan who had applied for refugee resettlement in the United States just four days before his death. And the suspicious materials Ahmadi had loaded into his car on the morning of his final day on earth? Canisters of fresh drinking water he was bringing back to his neighborhood.

Ahmadi was not the only innocent Afghan killed in the ill-advised drone strike. Family members who greeted him as he returned home—three of his children, three of his brother’s children, a cousin, and two other three-year-old girls—were also killed when the Hellfire missile struck his car.

The United States has conducted drone strikes against foreign adversaries since 2002. The Bush administration oversaw fifty-seven attacks in Pakistan, the Obama administration saw that number tick up to 542, and the Trump administration completely revoked the requirements for reporting on the frequency of such strikes. Given these trends, the United States is likely to continue increasing its reliance on drone technology to target terrorists abroad, as it results in less danger to American personnel and is more cost-effective than operations with American boots on the ground.

Two of the most publicized attacks utilizing the Reaper’s Hellfire missile in recent years include the 2015 killing of the Islamic State’s notorious “Jihadi John” in Syria and the 2020 attack that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al Muhandis in Baghdad. One need not be reminded of the public outrage regarding the Trump administration’s decision to conduct the latter, which notably took out the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. servicemembers.

Why, then, is there so little outrage over the targeted slaughter of an innocent family by the same means? And why did the Pentagon double down on painting it as a successful counterterrorism operation, asserting that there were secondary explosives in the car, until they could no longer deny the evidence?

When forced to finally face up to the fact that the strike had indeed not taken out an ISIS operative, McKenzie offered an apology, stating: “As the combatant commander, I am fully responsible for this strike in this tragic outcome.” Austin has gone on to order an Air Force investigation into the strike, and the Department of Defense’s inspector general also opened a separate investigation in recent days. Yet over a month after the attack, no one responsible—whether a political or military leader—has stepped down.

With U.S. troops no longer on the ground in Afghanistan, the military is likely to rely more heavily on drone strikes and “over-the-horizon” capabilities in the coming years. In order to successfully eliminate terrorist threats and avoid repeating such a deadly mistake in the future, the United States must figure out where the intelligence, reconnaissance, or decision making went wrong. Those who are found to be responsible must be held accountable. To truly conduct counterterrorism, one must actually counter terrorism; not, as the United States has just done, take the lives of innocent civilians, providing fodder for the propaganda that terrorists use for recruitment against the United States in the first place.

Eileen Walsh is a research associate at the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: Reuters.