Among Afghans, there have been calls for those responsible for throwing copies of the holy book into the “burn pit” to be tried in Afghan courts — something that Western military officials say privately will never happen, whatever the findings. Gen. John Allen, the American who commands the NATO force, told the BBC that he did not want to prejudice the investigation’s results, but that “appropriate disciplinary action” would be taken against anyone found to have acted improperly.
BY LAURA KING | LOS ANGELES TIMES
KABUL, Afghanistan — The desert’s nighttime chill had taken hold at a small U.S.-Afghan base in the Taliban’s heartland: in the home village, in fact, of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the movement’s founder and supreme commander. For the American troops manning the outpost, though, the danger came not from outside the wire, but from within.
Hours before dawn Thursday, one or more Afghan assailants, including a man hired to teach Afghan soldiers how to read, shot and killed two U.S. troops and wounded a third, Afghan and American officials said. The soldiers slain at the base in Kandahar province were the fifth and sixth U.S. military men to die in a span of eight days at the hands of Afghans they had worked alongside.
With these latest killings, the proportion of NATO military fatalities caused by such “insider” shootings this year stood at nearly one in five.
The deaths come against a backdrop of deepening mutual mistrust between many Afghans and their Western counterparts after riots tore through the country last week over what officials said was the inadvertent burning of copies of the Quran at a U.S.-run military base.
In the wake of the violence, which has left more than three dozen dead, hundreds of Western military and civilian advisers working at Afghan government ministries were withdrawn by the NATO force and foreign embassies. Troops at jointly run Afghan-coalition bases were ordered to keep their distance — and hold their tempers. Many foreign aid and development groups moved to isolate international staffs, citing safety fears. In the capital, most Westerners took care to keep a low profile.
Although mass protests over the Quran-burning died down at the end of last week, Western diplomats and military officials are still struggling to assess whether irreparable damage has been done to an already strained partnership with the Afghan military and government. That cooperation, fostered through years of painstaking efforts, lies at the heart of NATO’s hopes to largely step back from its combat role by the end of next year.
It’s a big-picture strategic question as well as a wrenchingly personal one. One Western civilian who has been working for months as an adviser to the Afghan government described a close Afghan colleague as being unwilling to meet her eyes after news of the Quran-burning broke.
“It was a very, very painful moment,” she said. “For me, and I think for them.”
Some Afghans, for their part, said they considered the international pullback from government ministries a demoralizing blow, although a trickle of foreign advisers — mainly those with “mission-critical” jobs — began returning to work this week. Sayed Hameed Sadaat, who works with foreign advisers at the Labor Ministry, said their abrupt withdrawal gave the impression of a “weak commitment” on the part of the international community to Afghanistan.
Publicly, U.S. officials have painted the Quran incident as a setback, but scarcely one that could shatter longtime bonds. They point out that the rioters made up only a tiny fraction of the Afghan population, and assert that it was a situation in which the Taliban and other Islamist militants seized an opportunity to both whip up and blend into the crowds. The American ambassador, Ryan Crocker, told the BBC this week he sees no “permanent rupture” arising from the episode.
But the Quran violence coincided, in perfect-storm fashion, with what has become a quickening drumbeat of so-called green-on-blue attacks — those carried out against foreign forces by Afghan allies. Even before the spate of American deaths that began last Thursday, the year had gotten off to a bad start: four French troops were killed in January by an Afghan soldier acting in apparent sympathy with the insurgents, and an Albanian soldier was killed by an Afghan policeman earlier this month in Kandahar.
The six American fatalities since the Quran burning became public Feb. 21 included two U.S. troops shot by an Afghan soldier at their base in eastern Afghanistan on Feb. 23, followed by two ranking officers — a major and a lieutenant colonel — shot point-blank at their desks on Saturday in the command-and-control center in the Interior Ministry, one of the most tightly guarded Afghan government installations. A ministry worker is being sought in those deaths.
The NATO force said in a statement that Thursday’s fatal shootings were carried out by a man thought to be an Afghan soldier, apparently acting in concert with a man in civilian clothing. Afghan officials suggested that the civilian, a literacy tutor working for the Afghan army, had managed to grab the weapon of an Afghan soldier.
NATO’s International Security Assistance Force gave the location only as southern Afghanistan. Afghan officials said the base was in the village of Sangisar, in Kandahar province, where Mullah Omar made a name for himself as a village preacher, in his pre-Taliban days back in the early 1990s.
The chief of Zhari district, where the base is located, said the assailant, whom he identified as a teacher named Wahidullah, was killed in return fire, along with an Afghan soldier. Another Afghan soldier was wounded, said Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi.
The Taliban movement generally claims responsibility for such shootings, often asserting that the assailant was someone who was planted in the ranks of the Afghan security forces by the insurgency. But in what could be a token of the sheer numbers of such incidents, Taliban spokesman Qari Yousaf Ahmadi said commanders were still checking to see whether this shooter was one of their own.
Although the riots’ fury appeared largely spent, renewed tensions could be in the offing as investigations of the Quran-burning incident move forward, with some results expected in coming days. The Afghans and the Americans are carrying out a joint investigation, but the two sides are undertaking separate probes as well.
Among Afghans, there have been calls for those responsible for throwing copies of the holy book into the “burn pit” to be tried in Afghan courts — something that Western military officials say privately will never happen, whatever the findings. Gen. John Allen, the American who commands the NATO force, told the BBC that he did not want to prejudice the investigation’s results, but that “appropriate disciplinary action” would be taken against anyone found to have acted improperly.