This is not the beginning of the end for the international community in Afghanistan. This is the end.
Freedom to Inflame
By PETER CATAPANO
The Thread is an in-depth look at how major news and controversies are being debated across the online spectrum.
Tags:
freedom of speech, Islam, Koran, religion
Don’t encourage him by paying attention. Just ignore him.
It’s what your elders told you about the class clown, or the needy, attention-seeking neighborhood kid fond of pranks, or maybe worse, and it’s what might have wisely been said about the theatrics of the pastor Terry Jones, who on March 20 made good on his plans to stage a public burning of a copy of the Koran. Jones, who is head of the World Dove Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., had originally intended to conduct this ritual on Sept. 11, 2010, but was talked down at the time by important people like President Obama, Gen. David E. Petraeus and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Despite some initial media reports about the burning, most seemed to follow that advice: just ignore him. But that strategy soon failed: news of the event soon spread and within a few days trouble began in Afghanistan and Pakistan (detailed by Robert Mackey at The Lede). Notably, President Hamid Karzai, to the dismay of many, added fuel to the fire by publicly denouncing Jones, as did several mullahs during last Friday’s prayers, sparking a series of violent and deadly protests against the pastor and his actions. The initial outburst and the murders of United Nations staff in Mazar-i-Sharif were reported in The Times on April 1:
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — Stirred up by three angry mullahs who urged them to avenge the burning of a Koran at a Florida church, thousands of protesters on Friday overran the compound of the United Nations in this northern Afghan city, killing at least 12 people, Afghan and United Nations officials said.
The dead included at least seven United Nations workers — four Nepalese guards and three Europeans from Romania, Sweden and Norway — according to United Nations officials in New York. One was a woman. Early reports, later denied by Afghan officials, said that at least two of the dead had been beheaded. Five Afghans were also killed.
More violence erupted in Kandahar and elsewhere in the following days, and protests continued through today.
This video posted online by Tolo TV, an Afghan television station, reportedly shows the scene on April 1 after Friday prayers in Mazar-i-Sharif, and protesters storming the U.N. compound:
Almost immediately, Una Moore, an aid worker writing from Kabul at U.N. Dispatch, sounded the alarm about the meaning of such an attack for the broader mission in Afghanistan.
Kabul, Afghanistan — Foreigners have been killed in Afghanistan before, and today’s attack was not the first fatal attack on UN staff. But it was different than previous fatal attacks. Very different. The killers were ordinary residents of a city deemed peaceful enough to be one of the first places transferred to the control of Afghan security forces. The men who broke into the UN compound, set fires and killed eight people weren’t Taliban, or henchmen of a brutal warlord, or members of a criminal gang. They weren’t even armed when the protests began — they took weapons from the UN guards who were their first victims.
Foreigners committed to assisting in the rebuilding of Afghanistan have long accepted the possibility that they might die at the hands of warring parties, but this degree of violence from ordinary citizens is not something most of us factored into our decision to work here. …
This is not the beginning of the end for the international community in Afghanistan. This is the end. Terry Jones and others will continue to pull anti-Islam stunts and opportunistic extremists here will use those actions to incite attacks against foreigners. Unless we, the internationals, want our guards to fire on unarmed protesters from now on, the day has come for us to leave Afghanistan.
Joel Hafvenstein at Registan, though, did not see the attacks as heralding the end of aid groups in the region:
I don’t think they fit a pattern of growing violent rejection of all aid work in Afghanistan, let alone a shift toward insurgent targeting of aid agencies. Yes, foreigners in Afghanistan will always be vulnerable to violence incited by extremists both Afghan and Western; foreigners working for agencies with a political mandate will be even more vulnerable. And yes, Afghan disillusionment with aid work is widespread. It’s not seen as “the solution,” because there’s now an ingrained expectation that most of it will be lost to corruption and expensive foreigners. At the same time, humanitarian aid workers and organisations who focus on delivering assistance at community level — rather than trying to contribute to a politically charged campaign of national stabilization — are still able to operate in most areas of Afghanistan at acceptable levels of risk, even without armed protection. They’re still saving lives, and I definitely don’t think the day has come for them to leave.
Back at home, of course, blame for the events — aimed at Jones, Karzai and of course the mobs themselves — came from every direction. But even more hackles were raised after Gen. David Petraeus condemned the Koran burning and members of Congress started discussing the matter — in particular, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” where Sen. Harry Reid admitted the possibility of a congressional investigation into Jones’s actions and Sen. Lindsey Graham alluded to the First Amendment. Graham said: “I wish we could find some way to hold people accountable. During WWII, you had limits on what you could say if it would inspire the enemy. Free speech is a great idea, but we are in a war. Any time in America we can push back against actions like this that put our troops at risk, we ought to do that.”
