So how, exactly, did the United States come to slaughter nearly a hundred Afghans, two-thirds of whom were children aged three months to sixteen years, while they slept? And what does it mean?

US officials say they’re investigating, while staunchly maintaining that the raid killed twenty-five “militants.” But Afghan officials, local residents, and the United Nations are counting scores of bodies, and it is feared that many more might be buried udner the rubble. (It’s not unusual for American planes to bomb civilian gatherings and wedding parties in Afghanistan, but the many dead this time may represent the highest single toll in any atrocity since the start of the war.)

What happened? The Post, happily carrying water for the Bush administration, quotes a US official — who provides zero evidence for his claim — saying that the Taliban deliberately fed bogus intelligence to the United States:

A U.S. official in Washington, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the Taliban has become adept at spreading false intelligence to draw U.S. strikes on civilians. “The fact is that the Taliban now has pretty good insight into where we’re picking up information and how we’re developing it into actionable intelligence,” the official said. “They’ve figured out a way to misguide us.”

The Times, on the other hand, quotes members of the Afghan parliament saying that bitter tribal rivalries, not the Taliban, fed false intelligence to the trigger-happy US Air Force:

How the military came to call in airstrikes on a civilian gathering is unclear. Two members of Parliament, Mr. Safi and Maulavi Gul Ahmad, who is from the area, said the villagers blamed tribal enemies for giving the military false intelligence on foreign fighters gathering in the village.

My own guess is that US intelligence in Afghanistan is so ridiculously bad that blaming either the Taliban (which isn’t that clever) or tribal rivalries won’t wash. Somewhere, a US Air Force commander ordered planes carrying dumb, 2000-pound bombs into action based on, well, pretty much nothing. And they’ve done that repeatedly.

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