U.S. authorities are fighting a fire with gasoline, escalating concessions to a group that will only be satisfied with having the Americans turned over to a raging mob.
Continuing down this road may be far more counterproductive than the administration realizes. A reprimand, a court-martial, even a prison sentence for those who have been named as responsible will be seen as falling short and willfully further insulting the easily insulted.
In all likelihood, there will be calls for revenge for that, too. Pretexts for revenge are a renewable resource. “U.S. probe of Koran burning finds 5 troops responsible, officials say; Afghans demand trial,” by Kevin Sieff for the Washington Post, March 2:
PUL-E-ALAM, Afghanistan “” Military investigators have concluded that five U.S. service members were involved in the incineration of a pile of Korans in Afghanistan last week, according to U.S. military officials who have been briefed on the inquiry.
The burning of the Muslim holy books “” which U.S. officials say was accidental “” incited a week of protests that left 30 Afghans dead. The burnings also were cited as motivation for at least some of the six fatal attacks on U.S. military personnel that have occurred in Afghanistan in the past eight days.
Investigators appointed by Marine Gen. John R. Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, found that the service members removed the Korans from a prison located at Bagram air base after they were discovered to contain extremist messages.
The books were then placed in an office for safekeeping, according to the inquiry. But they were mistaken for garbage and taken to a landfill on the base.
Afghan employees identified the books as Korans just as their pages caught fire, a major desecration according to Muslim teachings. The discovery led to a week of unprecedented tension between U.S. and Afghan military officials.
U.S. military officials said that although the five service members will be reprimanded, it is unlikely that their names will be released or that their punishment will approach the severity of what some Afghans are demanding, including trial in an Islamic court.
“For the soldiers, it will be serious “” they could lose rank. But you”re not going to see the kind of public trial that some here seem to want,” said one U.S. military official.
Another military official said: “What they did was careless, but there was no ill will.”
The much-discussed investigation was intended to quell unrest and prove to the Afghan public that U.S. officials were both apologetic and willing to make amends for wrongdoing.
But U.S. military officials expressed concern that the investigation’s finding “” which stops short of pinning blame on malevolent service members “” might not satisfy Afghan leaders who have have publicly demanded harsh retribution.
Senior Afghan clerics, in a statement issued after a meeting with President Hamid Karzai, said: “This evil action cannot be forgiven by apologizing. The perpetrators of the mentioned crime should be put on a public trial as soon as possible.”…