When Bad Information Kills People

This is what bad intelligence produces: a girl's dress, its embroidery stained dark red with blood, lying amid the rubble of a bombed-out building. Men wandering through the debris, gesturing to show where people were dancing when the bombs began to fall. And a U.S. special-forces soldier, who is said to have surveyed the scene and asked, "Why did we do this?"

It was a wedding party on a late December night. But from the air, it looked to the pilots like what their intelligence source had claimed: a gathering of al-Qaeda terrorists. Dozens of cars had converged on Qila-Niazi, a hamlet of 12 mud-walled homes in the shadow of a snowy ridge 80 miles southeast of Kabul. The women were gossiping and painting their hands red with henna. The men were in another room playing cards and dancing. Music drowned out the sounds of the U.S. warplanes overhead.

At 10:30 p.m., the first bombs struck the party; the assault lasted six hours. The next day, a team of special forces arrived in Qila-Niazi to inspect what was thought to have been a triumphant blow against Osama bin Laden's network. Instead it found the remains of the party. Out of 112 people, two women had survived. "When the U.S. soldiers saw the destruction, they were very sad," says Assaullah Falah, a tribal elder, as he leads a reporter through the wreckage.

Why did we do this? The question has echoed over the past two months as TIME and other publications have reported grim stories from Afghanistan that are at odds with Pentagon accounts of victorious strikes against the enemy. On Dec. 20, U.S. planes rocketed a convoy of tribal elders going to Kabul for the swearing-in ceremony of Afghan leader Hamid Karza and then chased the fleeing tribesmen into a village, killing 60, say locals. On Feb. 4, a Predator drone fired a Hellfire missile at a man who U.S. Central Command thought might be bin Laden. Villagers say the dead man was a scrap collector; the Pentagon says he was al-Qaeda. And on Jan. 24, special forces raided a compound in Uruzgan province, killing 16. Locals say the victims were not Taliban or al-Qaeda but supporters of Karzai.

Pentagon officials have conceded error only in the Jan. 24 case, grumbling that after 18,000 bombs and missiles have been dropped on Afghanistan--with a declared success rate of about 85%--no one should be surprised when innocents are hurt or killed. Army general Tommy Franks, who is running the war in Afghanistan, told TIME that civilian casualties "are probably on the low end of any we have ever seen in combat. We obviously could just bomb the heck out of the thing. But that's not the American way."