The Dark Absurdity of American Violence

Less than a year ago, the U.S. military, on its way out of Afghanistan, added to its ledger of collateral damage in the war it had waged for two decades. A few days after 13 American service members and almost 200 Afghan civilians were killed in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport, U.S. officials went looking for a white Toyota that they believed contained a car bomb. They found one, and they vaporized it. Officials initially thought that the strike had killed . Instead, the final tally of the dead consisted of one aid worker, two other adults, and seven children. Having fallen within some faraway officer’s acceptable margin of error, those people are now, in the official accounting, no more than details of and decided not to punish those responsible. Before the investigation, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had called the strike “righteous.” After the investigation, Marine Corps General Frank McKenzie, the head of U.S. Central Command, called it a “tragic mistake.”