DTN News - OBAMA IN AFGHANISTAN: President Obama Makes Surprise Afghanistan Visit

DTN News - OBAMA IN AFGHANISTAN: President Obama Makes Surprise Afghanistan Visit

Source: DTN News - - This article compiled by K. V. Seth from reliable sources Reuters
(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - May 25, 2014: President Barack Obama, on a visit to Afghanistan, said on Sunday his administration would likely announce soon how many troops the United States will keep in the country, as it winds down its presence after nearly 13 years of war.

Speaking at a briefing by military commanders at Bagram Air Base, Obama said one reason for his trip was to discuss the U.S. footprint for the rest of this year - when the bulk of troops are scheduled to be withdrawn - and afterward.

"We'll probably be announcing some decisions fairly shortly," said Obama, who flew into the main U.S. base in Afghanistan for a brief, surprise visit.

The trip on Memorial Day weekend, his fourth visit to Afghanistan, comes as Obama is buffeted by criticism at home that his handling of foreign policy has been too passive in dealing with crises from Syria to Ukraine and Russia. He is to respond to the criticism in a speech on Wednesday at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Obama also delivered remarks to troops at Bagram, getting hollers from the crowd as he told them, "I'm here on a single mission and that is to thank you for your extraordinary service." He was also set to visit wounded soldiers.

His trip was bound to be seen by some critics as an attempt to redeem himself in the eyes of military veterans who are alarmed at allegations that government-run medical facilities in the United States have not provided timely care for veterans.

At Bagram, Obama was briefed by Army General Joseph Dunford, who heads U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan James Cunningham.

NO PLANS TO VISIT KARZAI

Obama had no plans to visit the Afghan capital Kabul or meet

President Hamid Karzai and other government officials during a trip expected to last only a few hours. This allows him to avoid getting immersed in the country's presidential election campaign to choose a successor to Karzai, who has long been out of favor in Washington.

In an indication of the frayed relations between the Obama administration and the Karzai government, the Afghan president rejected an invitation extended through the U.S. embassy to meet Obama at Bagram, Abdul Karim Khurram, Karzai's chief of staff, told Reuters.

"President Karzai said he would warmly welcome him if he comes to the palace but in no way he would go Bagram to meet him," Khurram said.

Karzai has irked Obama by refusing to sign a bilateral security agreement that Washington wants before it will agree to leave a contingent of U.S. troops behind in Afghanistan for training Afghan forces and counter-terrorism operations, after the formal U.S. troop drawdown.

In turn, Karzai has long expressed anger at civilian deaths in Afghanistan. He told the Washington Post in an interview in March that the war in Afghanistan was not fought with his country's interests in mind.

In a statement issued before Obama's arrival in Afghanistan, Karzai criticized the U.S. phone surveillance program, saying it violates his country's sovereignty.

In his remarks to troops at Bagram, Obama said he was hopeful that the U.S.-Afghan bilateral security agreement would be signed once a new Afghan president was sworn in.

The number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan may drop well below 10,000 - the minimum demanded by the U.S. military to train Afghan forces, Obama administration officials briefed on the matter say.

There are now about 33,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, down from 100,000 in 2011, when troop numbers peaked a decade into a conflict in which more than 2,100 Americans have been killed.

Obama left Washington under cover of darkness on Saturday night and flew for more than 13 hours to arrive at Bagram on Sunday night local time. He brought with him country music star Brad Paisley to provide entertainment for the troops.

Wearing an Air Force One bomber jacket, Obama was also joined by national security adviser Susan Rice and special counselor John Podesta, who has a son stationed in Afghanistan.


(Additional reporting by Jeff Mason in Washington and Jessica Donati and Hamid Shalizi in Kabul; Editing by Caren Bohan and Frances Kerry)

*Link for This article compiled by K. V. Seth from reliable sources Reuters
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DTN News - DEFENSE NEWS: Strategic Airlift Crews Fight An Exhausting War In Anonymity

DTN News - DEFENSE NEWS:   Strategic Airlift Crews Fight An Exhausting War In Anonymity
*DTN News - AFGHAN WAR NEWS: First Batch Of 1,000 U.S. Soldiers Leave From Bagram Air Base In Afghan Drawdown - July 14, 2011
Source: DTN News - - This article compiled by Roger Smith from reliable sources By Chris Carroll  - Stars and Stripes
(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - June 22, 2012:  A C-17 lifted out of Ramstein Air Base, Germany, one afternoon last month packed with crates of servicemembers’ household goods up front and explosive munitions stacked on the cargo ramp in back. From there they could be jettisoned in a hurry if a fire broke out.

Minutes after takeoff, the plane’s commander, Lt. Col. John Wiltse, called out “copilot’s aircraft” and turned over the controls. The young officer to his right, Capt. Rick Loesch, acknowledged the command crisply, like Wiltse requires.

Slumping forward until his forehead rested against the instrument panel, Wiltse let out a sigh that deepened into a yawn. He took a long pull from a Monster energy drink, the first of several heavy caffeine doses he would consume during the nine-hour flight to Dover Air Force Base, Del.

For the previous five days, the crew had hopscotched around the Middle East and Europe, carrying food, ammunition, fuel and troops — the materiel and human components of the war in Afghanistan, which has depended on airlift likely more than any other major conflict. Now, after crossing more time zones than they could count and subsisting on precious little sleep, they were in the final stretch of the mission, and would reach home at Joint Base Lewis-McChord., Wash., the next day.

It’s this tail-end stage of the mission, Wiltse said, when strict attention to discipline and detail can mean the difference between a smooth trip home and a mounting string of errors.

Over decades as a military pilot, first for the Navy and now the Air Force, Wiltse, 46, has developed a wry set of guidelines he calls his rules of flying. In the waning hours of this mission, No. 2 was the key: Don’t become world famous.

Avoiding fame is probably not a rule of thumb that would occur to a fighter or bomber pilot facing the potential death-or-glory calculus of combat. But for long-distance airlift fliers, men and women who usually operate far from the front lines of battle doing grueling but obscure logistical work that powers any war effort, emerging from the background generally isn’t a good thing.

“There’s really no good way you become famous in this job,” Wiltse observed, relating a story about an airlift pilot who inadvertently destroyed his plane’s brakes, blocking a runway and temporarily shutting down a major aerial port. Among pilots, he became a worldwide topic of gossip.

Wiltse a day earlier had forgotten to close an isolation valve when he started his plane’s engines, he said — hardly a catastrophe, but a disturbing reminder of how easy it is to lose track of the details as long duty days pile up and exhaustion builds.

Wiltse resumed control of the massive C-17 and Loesch tore into a sandwich. Immediately, Loesch got a light-hearted chiding from his newly caffeinated commander for breaking Wiltse’s flying rule No. 5 — the control pedestal between the pilot seats isn’t a dinner table.

“When you get tired, what you have to rely on is your training, good habits and doing things the right way,” Wiltse said. “The thing we have to combat is indifference.”

A different kind of flier

The flight out of Ramstein was one of 750 flown worldwide each day by crews and aircraft from Air Mobility Command, or AMC, the arm of the Air Force in charge of airlifting U.S military cargo, transporting people and refueling other aircraft in midflight.

Weariness is standard when the demand for airlift, the speediest means of delivery, is insatiable. Impatient commanders don’t want to wait for supplies and equipment they believe, correctly or not, that they need now.

As one official said, “Everyone thinks the thing they want should have been flown in yesterday.”

Though it costs far more to move supplies by airlift than by ship, truck or rail, it’s the logistical tool of choice for time-sensitive and lifesaving missions — whether delivering food to earthquake victims in Haiti in 2010 or vehicle armor kits to shield troops from roadside bombs. More mundane needs, like a missing beam holding up a downrange construction project, can qualify, too.

It takes a different kind of flier. These aircrews measure their missions in weeks instead of hours, like most pilots and crew do. Mobility pilots live by a mantra — “Answering the call so others can prevail” — that drives home their status as supporting players.

“They’re not flashy,” said Brig. Gen. Larry Martin, vice commander of 18th Air Force, the flight operations component of AMC, which is headquartered at Scott Air Force Base, Ill. “Nothing against my bomber or fighter brethren, but mobility pilots take pride primarily in helping others. … You could say we’re not the story, but we’re here so others can be the story.”

Creating an ‘air bridge’

The supporting players have become central figures in the war in Afghanistan, thanks to the country’s landlocked position next to an increasingly disgruntled Pakistan. In retaliation for a firefight with NATO forces last year in which 24 Pakistani troops were killed, the country shut down crucial ground-based supply lines that were the easiest route for many kinds of war materiel into Afghanistan. Despite months of negotiations, the lines remain closed.

Nevertheless, supplies never dropped to critical levels thanks to the Air Force, which created an “air bridge” in the days following the closure, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Marine Gen. John Allen, said last month.

About 40 percent of the cargo reaching Afghanistan now goes in by plane, or by a combination of aircraft and other transportation modes, said Cynthia Bauer, a spokeswoman for U.S. Transportation Command, which directs all military cargo operations. Before Pakistan shut down the supply routes, the portion reaching Afghanistan by air was 30 percent while, typically, the U.S. military airlifts just 20 percent of its cargo, she said.

Despite the increased emphasis on airlift, overall cargo hauled by air into Afghanistan has tailed off since last year. The total in the first four months of 2012 fell 18.5 percent to about 154 million pounds, compared with 190 million pounds during the same period in 2011, when AMC was still hauling in mass amounts of equipment for the 30,000-troop surge that had recently entered Afghanistan.

Things are moving in the other direction now, with troop numbers dropping by 10,000 late last year and scheduled to fall another 23,000 by fall as the remaining surge troops are withdrawn.

Now, it’s the volume coming out of Afghanistan that’s on the rise, said Maj. Gen. David Allvin, commander of AMC’s Tanker-Airlift Control Center, which schedules and controls cargo, passenger and refueling flights worldwide. As the war winds down approaching the end of 2014, the demands of removing the vast amount of equipment in Afghanistan could fall heavily on the Air Force’s shoulders.

Already, vehicles and other loads that can only be brought out by air are piling up at vast “retrograde cargo” yards at Bagram and Kandahar air bases. Allvin is pushing to load every plane leaving the country to the limit before the real crunch hits when a fast-paced drawdown begins.

“A lot of planes were coming back empty,” he said, something that’s changing quickly.

Risk of burning out

Average mission lengths have decreased by a few days since the height of the surge, fliers say. Nevertheless, active-duty mobility crews still endure some of the most taxing schedules in the military, often spending 160 days a year away on missions, Allvin said.

The workload was even higher a few years ago, a former strategic airlift pilot said.

“The ops tempo during my time in the C-17 was pretty high, with most new pilots and loadmasters being gone 200-plus days a year,” said Capt. Cameron Sheafer, who has since left the airlift world for a piloting job he says he can’t publicly specify, but which allows him to see his wife and two young children daily. “There are a handful of guys I know that ate it up, but the majority started burning out after two or three years.”

He said he knows other pilots who also moved on to improve their quality of life.

“Twenty-four-hour duty days, constant time-zone skipping, eating out of shopettes, lack of exercise,” he said. “All of it had a cumulative effect of wearing guys out over time.”

Wiltse, who would head out on another mission just days after returning to McChord, agrees.

“You can’t turn your body on and off like a light switch,” he said. “On these missions, meaningful rest doesn’t happen. … The effect is cumulative. I see it in the mirror and in the faces of guys I work with.”

Sheafer said that when he raised the idea of shorter duty days with a commander, the response was a shrug and the observation, “You have to be tough to fly heavies.”

‘We keep coming back’

The grueling work far from the limelight is something many airlift crews accept, and even embrace.

“To me, this is exceptionally rewarding,” Staff Sgt. Eric Bratton said during another C-17 flight, this one flying from Ramstein to Bagram.

He was one of the loadmasters, crew responsible for loading and securing cargo on aircraft for a “contingency mission” carrying several satellite trucks and communications gear the Army needed quickly at a forward operating base near the Pakistan border.

“This is vital equipment,” he said. “You can easily see the effect it has on the war and what it would mean if those soldiers didn’t have it.”

On another mission flight from Dover Air Force Base to Germany, Lt. Col. Jeff Sladko, a reservist from the Alaska National Guard who as a civilian pilots airliners, said the airlift missions he flies a few months a year are a welcome adventure in the midst of more mundane airline flying.

“It’s just more satisfying,” Sladko said. “In airline flying you’re isolated — go in the cockpit and close the door. Doing this, there’s a greater sense of teamwork, and I have broader range of responsibilities. I need that challenge.”

One of the responsibilities of veterans like Sladko is partnering with less experienced active-duty crews and mentoring them, a key part of the Air Force’s recent Total Force Integration plan. On the trans-Atlantic flight, however, he was paired with another experienced Air Guard pilot, Maj. Doug Dickson.

“Sounds cliche, but we do it for God, country and apple pie,” Dickson said. “This is crucial work for the country. I don’t know if you can find a more patriotic set of people than the National Guard. We can walk away anytime we want, but we keep coming back.”

For Wiltse, on his nonstop back-and-forth delivery schedule, the importance of his missions is something he grasps rationally — some of the supplies could make it to Afghanistan no other way. That realization doesn’t erase a feeling in the background that he’s not really part of it, and the war is something going on at a distance.

“We fly, we land, we drop off stuff and leave, never spending any appreciable time in Afghanistan,” Wiltse said.

Some fliers of the smaller, rougher planes that land daily at forward operating bases around Afghanistan, or that swoop low between the mountains and parachute supplies into isolated outposts, see things similarly. Strategic airlift may deliver the bullets from the United States, but the tactical airlift crews put them into the hands of soldiers — sometimes in the middle of a firefight

“There’s a noticeable difference between us and them,” said a C-130 pilot, a veteran of tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, who asked not to be identified. “You can see it even in the dining facilities. The ones who are in Afghanistan all the time sit here, and guys who are just passing through, who look like they’ve only been wearing the desert flight suits for five days, are over there.”

Sacred duty

Wiltse doesn’t always feel that way, however. One sobering part of his mission changes his perspective from harried deliveryman back to someone fighting a war.

On the leg of the mission prior to the one out of Ramstein, Wiltse’s crew had cleared the plane of war materiel, set up litter carriers and helped medical personnel bring onboard several wounded warriors for transfer to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. The Air Force transfers thousands of patients each year on such aeromedical evacuation flights, and aircrews uniformly call it their most sacred duty.

“It’s humbling to go around the plane and take a look at these guys, some of them walking wounded, but some of whom are in terrible shape,” Wiltse said. “They’re the reality here, and helping them the way we’re able to is the most rewarding thing we do.”

In a war uniquely dependent on airlift, some loads are far more precious than others.


*Link for This article compiled by Roger Smith from reliable sources By Chris Carroll  - Stars and Stripes
*Speaking Image - Creation of DTN News ~ Defense Technology News 
*This article is being posted from Toronto, Canada By DTN News ~ Defense-Technology News Contact:dtnnews@ymail.com 
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DTN News - OBAMA IN AFGHANISTAN: Obama’s Afghanistan Plan - Echoes of Vietnam In The U.S. Exit Strategy

DTN News - OBAMA IN AFGHANISTAN: Obama’s Afghanistan Plan - Echoes of Vietnam In The U.S. Exit Strategy
Source: DTN News - - This article compiled by Roger Smith from reliable sources By Tony Karon - Time (Blog)
(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - May 2, 2012: To understand the historical significance of President Barack Obama’s visit to Afghanistan on Tuesday, imagine that President Richard Nixon had, in the spring of 1972, flown to Saigon to signal American voters that the Vietnam war was coming to an end — and to ink a deal with President Nguyen Van Thieu codifying a long-term U.S. relationship with the Republic of South Vietnam, which would shortly be left responsible for its own security. 

“Today, I signed a historic agreement between the United States and Afghanistan that defines a new kind of relationship between our countries – a future in which Afghans are responsible for the security of their nation, and we build an equal partnership between two sovereign states; a future in which the war ends, and a new chapter begins,” Obama said Tuesday.  Nixon might have said something similar on that imaginary 1972 visit. Except, of course, everyone knew that Vietnam’s future would not be defined by an agreement between Washington and Thieu, as much as by the one signed in Paris, two months after Nixon’s reelection, between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, representing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (a.k.a. “North Vietnam”). Even that deal collapsed, of course, with the DRV and its supporters in the south finishing off the Thieu regime 19 months after U.S. troops withdrew.

Any deal between Presidents Obama and Karzai premised on the ability of the current political order in Kabul to protect itself independently of foreign troops is hardly likely to be the last word, pleasing as the spectacle may be for presidential campaign purposes. The key — but by no means the only — conversation shaping Afghanistan’s future will be the one conducted on the battlefield, and at the negotiating table, between the U.S., its Afghan interlocutors and the Taliban. That point seemed to be underscored by a Taliban car bomb attack near U.S. bases in Kabul just hours after Obama’s departure, which served as a counterpoint to the President’s insistence in his speech that the insurgents’ momentum has been broken. 

Sure, the U.S. has made important tactical gains against the Taliban in designated operational areas in southwestern Afghanistan, but tactical gains in an expeditionary counterinsurgency war tend to be just that; the insurgents know that, as Henry Kissinger famously put it, guerrilla armies win by not losing. They know that the civilian population has little faith in Western forces or in the government those forces protect, and they know the U.S. and its allies are seeking an expeditious exit from Afghanistan. The brutal truth of the Afghanistan equation is that time is still on the side of the Taliban.

The U.S. plans to drawn down troop levels from the current 90,000 to less than 20,000 by the end of 2014, while helping Afghan security forces “surge” to an anticipated 352,000 troops this year. The new agreements seemed to signal a ten-year commitment to maintain an unspecified number of troops for training, intelligence and logistics purposes, and to conduct operations against al-Qaeda. (More importantly, the U.S., as well as other NATO countries, will commit later this month to a decade-long financial package to the government in Kabul worth over $4 billion a year, a sum some say Karzai considers insufficient.)

“We will not build permanent bases in this country, nor will we be patrolling in cities and mountains,” Obama said. “That will be the job of the Afghan people.” But so narrow is the political base of the Karzai regime, which was elected by a small minority of Afghans and whose corruption is endemic, that its ability to lead a credible counterinsurgency fight against the Taliban remains seriously in doubt. The problem is not simply that the Afghan forces lack sufficient training, or that the Afghan government can’t afford to pay for the indigenous army that NATO has created to keep it alive; the problem is fundamentally one of motivation. How many Afghan troops are really ready to fight and die to keep President Karzai in power? One troubling indicator might be the by-now routine incidence of Afghan friendlies turning their weapons on their U.S. and other Western mentors — an incidence the AP claims the military is systematically underreporting.

President Obama did, of course, acknowledge that negotiations with the insurgency were underway. “My Administration has been in direct discussions with the Taliban,” he said. “We have made it clear they can be part of this future if they break with al-Qaida, renounce violence and abide by Afghan laws.” The Taliban may negotiate, and they may not — for a range of reasons ranging from mistrust of the U.S. to the fact that they feel the wind at their backs and because they know the Americans will leave, and also because the Taliban is no longer a single hierarchical entity, but a series of networks, with many of the younger commanders who have replaced those killed by U.S. forces in recent years adopting an even more militant and intractable position. The longer the fighting rages on, analysts of the Taliban warn, the less likely it becomes that those more inclined to negotiate a compromise are able to prevail in the movement’s internal debates over those who believe they will win a bigger victory by fighting on.

Still, even if the Taliban was willing to negotiate a political settlement, it’s a relative certainty that the insurgents won’t accept the terms laid down by President Obama: Even if the Taliban was willing to commit to preventing Afghan territory being used to stage international terror attacks, it’s unlikely to accept Afghan laws and a constitution adopted on the back of a Western invasion. Afghanistan had been engaged in a civil war for a decade before the U.S.-led invasion prompted by the 9/11 attacks, and the invasion didn’t change that; it simply tipped the balance in that civil war against the Pakistan-backed and predominantly Pashtun Taliban and in favor of the Northern Alliance, dominated by ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, and backed by India, Iran and Russia. It is the Northern Alliance that forms the basis of the current order in Kabul, but take Western troops out of the equation, and the equation changes. The Taliban would only be likely to accept the Karzai order in Kabul if it had lost the war; right now, that’s not happening, meaning that a political solution is unlikely without a substantial renegotiation of the distribution of power. The likelihood that the Taliban will reconcile itself to a lesser role in the Karzai order is about as remote as those of the North Vietnamese being willing to accept Thieu’s authority.

Nor is it simply a case of Karzai reaching an accommodation with the Taliban: Key elements in the Northern Alliance are deeply mistrustful of any deals with the Taliban, and mistrust Karzai — and what they see as his effort to juggle the interests of competing warlords. His regime is brittle, at best, and could easily collapse — particularly because 2014 is also the year in which his tenure expires

Then again, right now the insurgents may be more likely to wait out 2014 and test the proposition that the Karzai regime will be able to defend itself without U.S. forces making the decisive difference — just like the Vietcong did in the period between the Paris agreement and the fall of Saigon.

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*Link for This article compiled by Roger Smith from reliable sources By Tony Karon - Time (Blog)
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DTN News - AFGHAN WAR NEWS: Koran Burning In NATO Error Incites Afghans

DTN News - AFGHAN WAR NEWS: Koran Burning In NATO Error Incites Afghans
Source: DTN News - - This article compiled by Roger Smith from reliable sources By Alissa J Rubin, Sangar Rahimi also Sharifullah Sahak and Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting -  New York Times 
(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada / BAGRAM, Afghanistan - February 22, 2012: Word that NATO personnel had burned an undisclosed number of Korans and were preparing to dispose of many more by incineration set off an angry protest here on Tuesday. NATO officials rushed to apologize publicly and profusely, trying to head off what they feared could be a nationwide outburst of violence as news of the burning was gradually broadcast across the country.

About 2,000 Afghans descended on the largest American air base in their country in the bitter cold to protest what is generally regarded as one of the most offensive acts in the Muslim world.

“I offer my sincere apologies for any offense this may have caused, to the president of Afghanistan, the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and, most importantly, to the noble people of Afghanistan,” the NATO commanding general, John R. Allen, said in a statement that was recorded and sent to local television and radio networks here, explaining that the burnings had been unintentional.

Within a few hours of learning about the episode, General Allen ordered an investigation, and by day’s end he issued an order for every coalition soldier in Afghanistan to complete training in the next 10 days in “the proper handling of religious materials.”

But 10 years into the Afghan war, foreign officials and Afghans alike were shocked that any member of the foreign forces in Afghanistan did not know just how offensive desecrating the Muslim holy book could be, or recognize the potential for violence it could unleash in a country where news of the burning of a single Koran — by a preacher in Florida — provoked mobs to ransack a United Nations office and kill 12 people in April.

Because Afghans are fiercely protective of the sanctity of their Islamic faith, the Afghan authorities moved quickly to try to control the protest at one of the gates of Bagram Air Base. The local police and government officials also persuaded the crowd at a large demonstration in nearby Kapisa Province to disperse peacefully.

According to Afghan workers who witnessed the events, around 10 or 11 p.m. on Monday a dump truck escorted by a military vehicle drove up to the landfill at Bagram Air Base, where 20 or so Afghans work. Two uniformed NATO personnel, a man and a woman, began unloading bags of books from the back of the truck and throwing them into a pit for incineration. NATO officials said it was not yet clear if the two people were troops or civilians. Some civilians also wear military uniforms and can easily be mistaken for soldiers. The Afghan workers described the pair as Americans.

Accounts from some of the workers at the landfill suggested that the two people were oblivious to the significance of what they were doing. They made no attempt to hide the books, instead appearing to be routinely carrying out their duties.

“When we saw these soldiers burning books, we moved closer to see what was going on, and one of the boys said, ‘It is Holy Koran,’ ” said one of the laborers, Zabiullah, 22. “And we attacked them with our yellow helmets, and tried to stop them. We rushed towards them, and we threw our helmets at the vehicles.”

Abdul Wahid, 25, another of the laborers, said he and two friends had shouted at the two people: “Don’t burn our holy book! We will give it to our mullahs!”

The two NATO personnel drew back, but two bags of books they had already thrown into the pit had begun to burn.

“We tried to put out the fire with bottles of water, and then we pulled back the bags, and the boys also pulled out the half-burned books,” said Zabiullah, referring to his co-workers.

Protests began hours later, as Afghan workers who had witnessed the burning emerged from the base, one or two of them carrying damaged Korans hidden in their clothes. Protests swelled through the morning and became violent as hundreds of infuriated Afghans set tires on fire and burned an external checkpoint at one of the entrances to the air base.

Shouting “Death to America” and “We don’t want them anymore,” they closed the district government building and stopped people trying to go to the center of the town, witnesses said. Some in the crowd sang Taliban songs, and several Urdu speakers, described as Pakistanis, made speeches.

In his apology, General Allen confirmed the burnings, but portrayed them as absolutely unintentional.

“When we learned of these actions, we immediately intervened and stopped them,” his written statement said. “The materials recovered will be properly handled by appropriate religious authorities.”

“We are thoroughly investigating the incident, and we are taking steps to ensure this does not ever happen again. I assure you ... I promise you ... this was NOT intentional in any way.”

While General Allen and his recent predecessors have tried to improve soldiers’ cultural training and, according to many Afghans, have succeeded in some measure, events like the one late Monday threaten to seriously undermine those gains. Previous complaints about the behavior of foreign forces have involved their actions in night raids, in detention facilities and in day-to-day relations with Afghans.

“They have burned our Holy Korans,” said Mohammed Asif, 30, who was demonstrating in front of the gates of Bagram Air Base. “We are Muslims and we are created by God and the Koran is our God’s book; we have to defend it. This means they burned our faith, our honor and our lives. The person who did this must stand trial.”

The number of burned Korans appeared to have been around 10 to 15, said Farid Ahad Shafaq, a member of the provincial council in Parwan who went into Bagram Air Base to meet with NATO officials. “We saw the burned copies,” he said. “Some were burned completely, and some were burned a little bit, and some were just exposed to heat.”

Still unclear was how many Korans NATO had planned to burn, said Mr. Shafaq, adding that he and others had not been told exactly where the Korans in the detention center’s library had originally come from. He said military officers had said that “we have gathered all these Korans and holy books during our operations and night raids and house searches, and some have been given to the military personnel as gifts by Afghans working with Americans on the base.”

That did not make sense to Mr. Shafaq, however, because all the copies that the officers showed him were new, he said. “I mean they looked absolutely unused,” Mr. Shafaq said.

The Taliban condemned the American action, calling it a “wild act” of disrespect to the Muslim Afghan people. Anti-Americanism already runs strong here, and after previous desecrations, military leaders have denounced them for putting foreigners’ lives at risk.

 
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*Link for This article compiled by Roger Smith from reliable sources By Alissa J Rubin, Sangar Rahimi also Sharifullah Sahak and Jawad Sukhanyar contributed reporting -  New York Times 
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