Just who did we target — and what was the collateral damage — in a drone strike on a reported ISIS suicide bomber? The Taliban now claim that the drone hit a house, while the US military claims to have struck a vehicle causing a secondary explosion that killed as many as ten civilians.

The Washington Post reports the cross-claims in a straightforward manner, without much analysis. It does note that CENTCOM has conceded that the attack may have caused civilian casualties:

A U.S. drone strike targeting the Islamic State killed 10 civilians in Kabul, including several small children, family members told The Washington Post on Monday. The dead were all from a single extended family and were getting out of a car in their modest driveway when the strike hit a nearby vehicle.

U.S. Central Command said the strike Sunday destroyed an Islamic State car bomb that posed an “imminent” threat to Kabul’s airport. The command said in a statement it was “aware of reports of civilian casualties,” adding: “We would be deeply saddened by any potential loss of innocent life.”

The Taliban have already publicly condemned the action, declaring that the attack was “arbitrary” rather than targeted. Zabihullah Mujahid told China state television that the US should have alerted the Taliban rather than act on its own:

A Taliban spokesman said a US drone strike targeting a suspected suicide bomber in Kabul on Sunday resulted in civilian casualties and condemned the United States for failing to inform the Taliban before ordering the strike.

Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told China’s state television CGTN on Monday that seven people were killed in the drone attack, describing the US action on foreign soil as unlawful.

“If there was any potential threat in Afghanistan, it should have been reported to us, not an arbitrary attack that has resulted in civilian casualties,” Mujahid said in a written response to CGTN. …

Mujahid had issued a similar condemnation of a US drone strike on Saturday that killed two Islamic State militants in the eastern province of Nangarhar. He said two women and a child were wounded in that attack.

On one level, the Taliban’s ire is beside the point. The US forces in Afghanistan have the right to defend themselves against the attacks currently raining down on them in Kabul, having been left vulnerable due to the idiocy of the commands from Washington DC. If terrorists choose to embed themselves with civilians in the execution of those attacks, then any such civilian casualties are their responsibility, not ours. And if we got the suicide bomber and his bomb went off, that’s more or less confirmation of a well-targeted strike, if not a particularly well-chosen location.

On that point, take a look at the all of the buildings around where the car was struck in Richard Engel’s report:

Richard Engel reports @TodayShow as rockets were fired toward Kabul airport early Monday. pic.twitter.com/nUmhts8YFR

— On Assignment with Richard Engel (@OARichardEngel) August 30, 2021

This brings up a very uncomfortable point about White House claims for future counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan. Joe Biden has insisted that we can prevent terror networks from metastasizing in Afghanistan with “over the horizon” counter-terror operations. The Biden administration suggested that these two drone attacks are examples of how that will work. They have even suggested — laughably — that the Taliban might find it in their own interest to help coordinate such attacks.

This strike shows all of the ways in which those assumptions are preposterous, even if we ended up hitting a real terrorist. The Taliban have no self-interest in tying themselves to civilian casualties created by American airstrikes, no matter how many times Biden mutters “ISIS-K is the sworn enemy of the Taliban” like a mantra. They have every interest possible in humiliating the US and Western nations more broadly by assigning us every ill that befalls Afghan civilians in the future. Even if they don’t deliberately mislead us on targeting — which is a real risk in relying on the Taliban for our eyes and ears — they can put us in bad positions regarding collateral damage while aiming us only at those targets that they would otherwise have to deal with themselves.

There is no substitute for our own eyes and ears on the ground in long-range counter-terror operations. The next best substitute is a strongly allied military that relies on our logistics and intelligence structure, which we had until Biden demolished those structures in his haste to declare a total withdrawal. We are still in Kabul for another few hours, and we were forced to take a high-risk shot with predictable collateral damage. That shows that the quality of our over-the-horizon capability is already degraded. What will it be like in a couple of weeks? Months? Years?