WASHINGTON (Dispatches) -- In the years since American boots on the ground gave way to a war of airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, the U.S. military has made a central promise: that precision bombs and drones would kill enemies while minimizing the risks to civilians.
Recent investigations by The New York Times have undercut that promise, the newspaper said in a new report, revealing hidden Pentagon documents about the tragic toll of America’s endless wars.
In September, reports said that a drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, which American officials said had destroyed a vehicle laden with bombs, had instead killed 10 members of a family. Last month, The Times reported that dozens of civilians had been killed in a 2019 bombing in Syria that the military had hidden from public view.
Now, a Times investigation has found that these were not outliers, but rather the regular casualties of a transformed way of war gone wrong, the paper said.
Drawing on more than 1,300 documents from a hidden Pentagon archive, the investigation reveals that, since 2014, the American air war has been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, the Times said.
In addition to reviewing the military’s own assessments of reports of civilian casualties — obtained through Freedom of Information requests and lawsuits against the Defense Department and U.S. Central Command — the paper said it visited nearly 100 casualty sites in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and interviewed scores of surviving residents and current and former American officials.
According to the military’s count, 1,417 civilians have died in airstrikes in Iraq and Syria; since 2018 in Afghanistan, U.S. air operations have killed at least 188 civilians. But The Times said it found that the civilian death toll was significantly higher.
Discrepancies, according to the paper, arose in case after case — none more stark than a 2016 bombing in the Syrian hamlet of Tokhar.
American Special Operations forces hit what they claimed were three Daesh “staging areas”. A military investigation concluded that seven to 24 civilians might have died. But, The Times found, the targeted buildings were houses where families had sought refuge and more than 120 civilians were killed.
The Pentagon has also failed to uphold pledges of transparency and accountability, the paper said.
Until now, only a handful of the assessments have been made public. None included a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Only one cited a “possible violation” of the rules of engagement — a breach in the procedure for identifying a target. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though injured survivors often required costly medical care, it added.
“The records show little effort by the military to identify patterns of failure or lessons learned.”
In many instances, The Times said, the command that had approved a strike was responsible for examining it, often using incorrect or incomplete evidence. In only one case did investigators visit the site of a strike, it said, adding in only two did they interview survivors or witnesses.
Taken together, the 5,400 pages of records point to an institutional acceptance of civilian casualties. In the logic of the military, the paper said, a strike was justifiable as long as the expected risk to civilians had been properly weighed against the military gain, and it had been approved up the chain of command.
At an ever-quickening pace over the next five years, and as the administration of Barack Obama gave way to that of Donald J. Trump, American forces executed more than 50,000 airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, according to The Times.
The records suggest that civilian deaths were often the result of “confirmation bias,” or the tendency to find and interpret information in a way that confirms pre-existing beliefs. People rushing to a bombing site were assumed to be Daesh fighters, not civilian rescuers. Men on motorcycles, thought to be moving “in formation,” displaying the “signature” of an imminent attack, were just men on motorcycles.
According to the paper, cultural blind spots also left innocent civilians vulnerable to attack. The military judged, for example, that there was “no civilian presence” in a house where families were napping during the days of the Ramadan fast or sheltering from the heat or intense fighting.
For all their promise of pinpoint accuracy, at times the American weapons simply missed, it said. In 2016, the military reported that it had killed Neil Prakash, a notorious Australian Daesh recruiter, in a strike on a house in East Mosul. Four civilians died in the strike, according to the Pentagon.
 Months later, Prakash was arrested crossing from Syria into Turkey.
A target like a weapons cache or power station came with the potential for secondary explosions, which often reached far beyond the expected blast radius. These accounted for nearly a third of all civilian casualties acknowledged by the military and half of all civilian deaths and injuries at the sites visited by The Times.
A June 2015 strike on a car-bomb factory in Hawija, Iraq, is among the deadliest examples. In plans for the nighttime attack, the nearest “collateral concern” was assessed to be a “shed.” But apartment buildings ringed the site, and dozens of displaced families, unable to afford rent, had also been squatting in abandoned buildings close by. According to the military investigation, as many as 70 civilians were killed that night.