Military Prepares to Explain Koran Burnings As Afghan Riots Continue - Wired News (blog)

An Afghan police battalion practices riot control. Photo: Flickr/ISAF

The U.S. once hoped its investigation into its troops' burning the Koran would calm outrage in Afghanistan. But that was before four Americans were killed in the resultant violence, including two troops killed inside the very Interior Ministry that Washington bankrolls. Now, as the military prepares to release the results of its inquiry this week, the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, Ryan Crocker, says the best the Washington can hope for is for the popular anger to peter out.

Protests — some better called riots — have spread into their sixth day. Most shockingly, an Interior Ministry employee killed two U.S. servicemembers working in the ministry's Kabul headquarters, reportedly by shooting them in the head on Saturday with a silencer-equipped pistol. Pentagon press secretary George Little called the killings "murder."

The killings prompted Gen. John Allen, commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, to pull all U.S. military advisers out of Afghan government ministries in Kabul as a protective measure. Allen's subordinate commanders frequently tell reporters that U.S. and Afghan security forces work together intimately; the prompt removal of advisers indicates a distrust below the surface. Crocker told CNN on Sunday that he had issued a complementary order for U.S. diplomats.

Associated Press Pentagon reporter Robert Burns tweeted on Sunday that the Pentagon has cancelled a visit from Afghan ministers scheduled for this week. President Hamid Karzai waited until the sixth day of riots to issue a call to avoid violence. Even so, on Sunday, a grenade thrown by protesters in northern Afghanistan wounded at least six U.S. troops.

U.S. and NATO officials told reporters at the Pentagon last week that the official inquiry into how U.S. troops at the Parwan prison on the outskirts of Bagram Air Base burned Korans would be completed before February ends. NATO is supposed to release a version of the inquiry's findings to the public. But it remains to be seen how an explanation can quell the violence. Officials from Allen to President Obama have apologized for what they say was an accidental incineration, and the riots have continued.

Crocker didn't hold out hope for the inquiry to make a difference to the riots around Afghanistan. "At a certain point, it tapers off," he told CNN's Candy Crowley on Sunday, "and I think we're all hopeful that the appeal for calm that President Karzai made today — and he did so with the backing of the entire political leadership of the country — will create a condition in which this diminishes."

Stories have spread throughout the Pentagon — though unconfirmed by any official — that the burning occurred after U.S. troops slated library material at the Parwan detention center for destruction, to prevent detainees from passing each other messages. Allegedly, troops did not realize Korans were included in that material.

Clarity should occur this week. But any calming effect may not. "There is a sense that America is lurching from one image crisis to the next in Afghanistan," writes Reuters' Phil Stewart, "with no clear path for U.S. officials to defuse the latest uproar."