I’ve been underpants-bomber’d out for I guess ten days now, so I’ve dropped the Kunar story and haven’t had time to get back into it. My friend Una has two very long and careful posts about what we know and what we don’t know. I’ll be catching up shortly, but this is an excellent place to start. This is a judicious conclusion and I associate myself with it:

What we do know is that eight adolescent and teenage boys died horrifically nine days ago. Regardless of the circumstances, this is a tragedy; depending on the circumstances, it’s possibly also a war crime. But until we have the final reports, we should resist the urge to draw conclusions.

What we should also recognize is that there’s a narrative to Kunar that resonates among Afghans regardless of its truth, and that’s that the U.S. carried out a massacre. That perception is a fact and has to be confronted one way or the other. Juan Cole has more.