I'm surprised that this has not been diaried already but I could not find any references to it in a "Search".
Several days ago, on 6 July, an early morning wedding procession in eastern Afghanistan's Nargarhar Region was crossing through a pass in a ridge separating two valleys when they were bombed by American planes. It was to have been a big double wedding between two families, with each family exchanging a bride and a groom.
What began as celebration ended with maybe 52 people dead, most of them women and children, and others badly injured.
BBC News
As usual, U.S. military spokespeople initially denied the story.
They claimed that Taliban insurgents had been "clearly identified" among the group. "[T]his may just be normal, typical militant propaganda," said 1st Lieutenant Nathan Perry. Despite accounts of the wounded, including women and children, being brought to a local hospital, Captain Christian Patterson, coalition media officer, insisted: "It was not a wedding party, there were no women or children present. We have no reports of civilian casualties."
...We took hostile fire and we returned fire,' said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations... He said there were no indications that the victims of the attack were part of a wedding party."
TomDispatch
BBC's Alastair Leithead actually traveled to the scene of the bombing attack and reports on what he found:
On a hillside high in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan there are three charred clearings where the American bombs struck.
Scattered around are chunks of twisted metal, blood stains and small fragments of sequinned and brightly decorated clothes - the material Afghan brides wear on their wedding day.
After hours of driving to the village deep in the bandit country of Nangarhar's mountains we heard time and again the terrible account of that awful day.
What began as celebration ended with maybe 52 people dead, most of them women and children, and others badly injured.
The US forces said they targeted insurgents in a strike. But from what I saw with my own eyes and heard from the many mourners, no militants were among the dead.
The entire story, with a video, is here.
This is not the first wedding party that has been bombed. We might recall after that event that it was Kimmitt denying that a different wedding party had been obliterated -- in the Western Iraqi desert, near the Syrian border, in May 2004.
More than 40 people died, including children, women, musicians, and a well-known Iraqi wedding singer hired for the event. According to Rory McCarthy of the British Guardian, who interviewed some of the hospitalized survivors, 27 members of one extended family died when the jets arrived.
TomDispatch
It looks like "Taliban" has become a catch-all term for all armed resistance to the US led occupation. "Taliban" is a handy scare-word that sets off connotations with al Qaeda and 9/11. It obscures the true, more complex nature of the resistance to the on-going occupation.
But amid a well-coordinated assassination attempt on Afghan President Hamid Karzai and large-scale bombings last week in the capitals of both Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. forces are keenly aware that they are facing an increasingly complex enemy here—what U.S. military officials now call a syndicate—composed not only of Taliban fighters but also powerful warlords who were once on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency. "You could almost describe the insurgency as having two branches," says a senior U.S. military official here. "It's the Taliban in the south and a 'rainbow coalition' in the east."
U.S. News
In a diary yesterday MmeVoltaire wrote about a recent incident in eastern Afghanistan in which 9 Americans were killed and 15 wounded and noted that monthly death tolls of NATO personnel in Afghanistan are higher than US deaths in Iraq.
The resistance continues to gain strength precisely because of incidents like the the bombing in Nangarhar. This is inevitable when any country is occupied by force. People are seeing their families slaughtered without mercy, and without justice.
In the long run time is on their side.