Which in practice is done by using machine learning [1] on huge data sets gathered with that global surveillance enabled trough Five Eyes.

Because the army of humans that could manually sort trough those zettabytes of data has yet to be cloned. All that ends up in the fancy-sounding "disposition matrix" [2] aka the USGs kill-list. It's just systems upon systems doing their thing and nobody is directly responsible or accountable for anything that ends up happening, like when yet another 30 Afghani farmers get "splatted" by accident [3].

Considering how this has been going on for close to two decades, and the US has a very convenient way going about the casualty statistics [4], I guess these Afghani farmers are just another rounding error in the "war on terror". Figures, because before that they were mostly considered biometric cattle [5] and lab-rats for fantasies about "full-spectrum surveillance" [6].

Note: Under Trump, the USG now even stopped releasing their shined up drone statistics. So it's pretty much impossible to know the full scale about what's still going on to this day.

[0] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/19/us-drone-strik...

[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-o...

[5] https://www.wired.com/2010/09/afghan-biometric-dragnet-could...

[6] https://we-make-money-not-art.com/big-eye-kabul-surveillance...