From The New York Times and CSP:
Koran Burning in Afghanistan Prompts 3 Parallel Inquiries
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and GRAHAM BOWLEY
Published: February 29, 2012
KABUL, Afghanistan — Three major investigations were under way on Wednesday into the Koran burning at Bagram Air Base by the American military last week, the event that plunged Afghanistan into days of deadly protests claiming as many as 30 Afghan lives and coinciding with the shooting deaths of four American soldiers.
Two of those American deaths, in the Afghan Interior Ministry on Saturday, prompted Gen. John R. Allen, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, to immediately withdraw hundreds of military advisers and trainers from government ministries in Kabul.
Military vehicles were back on the streets of Kabul again on Wednesday, and NATO had begun to prepare procedures to send the trainers and advisers back into the ministries, said Brig. Gen. Lewis Boone, the NATO spokesman, but he could not say whether any had begun to work again.
“We are working with the Afghan government to put in place procedures that would allow advisers to return to their workplaces,” General Boone said. “General Allen will approve these procedures.” General Boone did not say what those procedures were.
In a tense atmosphere in Afghanistan, the investigations signal the seriousness of the incident for both the Afghans and the Americans and an understanding of the need to offer a full explanation and a reckoning for the perpetrators.
After the protests, Afghanistan has been quiet in the past few days, but the findings of the reports are keenly awaited by Afghans and are likely to prove politically delicate and to be a test of public opinion.
One investigation is by Americans, one is by Afghans and one is a joint Afghan-American inquiry.
The formal American military investigation is the only one that can lead to punishment, while the other two will include recommendations but do not carry formal legal weight.
The formal legal inquiry, opened by General Allen on Feb. 21, is intended to understand the events that led to soldiers throwing Korans and other Muslim religious texts into a burn pit at the military base more than a week ago.
The investigation, known as an AR15-6, the number in the Army regulatory code, is a first step in a process that could lead ultimately to criminal legal action or lesser administrative punishment.
The formal investigation ordered by General Allen involves initial fact finding by a senior military officer, an American Army brigadier general, who was not involved in the incident.
The inquiry will conclude with a final report, which could comprise a recommendation for further legal action, including a more formal process that could lead to court-martial. The final report is due to be handed to General Allen in the second half of March. Any legal action will be pursued under United States laws and regulations, not Afghan laws, a NATO legal official who asked for anonymity because the investigation was continuing said Wednesday.
The brigadier general in charge of the investigation has been at the Detention Facility in Parwan and the Bagram Air Base since Feb. 22, interviewing the people involved and inspecting the evidence, and was in the process of returning to the capital, Kabul.
The formal investigation overlaps with a joint inquiry that also includes three senior Afghan security officials from the Afghan Army, the National Directorate of Security and the Interior Ministry, who have been at Parwan and Bagram with the American brigadier general.
This joint inquiry will lead to a joint report that will be passed to General Allen for review, and that could then be released publicly as early as the next three or four days.
It is much more preliminary and its recommendations will not be binding, but it is likely to include much of the material in the formal investigation, and so could provide a snapshot of the issues involved.
Similar investigations were undertaken in the past when the American military defamed the Koran.
There have been at least two other serious instances, and at least one led to the punishment of military personnel. One group of incidents occurred at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the other in Iraq, when at least one soldier used a Koran for target practice.
At Guantánamo Bay, there were accusations — later deemed untrue by the military — that soldiers had flushed a Koran down the toilet. The final military investigation concluded, however, that there had been five instances of the mishandling of the Koran by guards and an interrogator over the course of a number of years, and two soldiers were punished.
General Allen can choose to act on the recommendations of the AR15-6 investigation, ignore them or combine them with other steps, a military officer said in a background briefing.
Among the available punishments are everything from demotions and discharge from the military to imprisonment.
“General Allen takes this process extremely seriously,” said an legal official with the NATO-led coalition. “He can accept the recommendations, and he can make his own recommendations.”
While one possible result of the investigation is a court-martial, and even imprisonment, officials say that would be an extreme outcome. There are many more minor forms of punishment — yet even those far lighter penalties would be taken seriously by people in the military chain of command.
More than 30 Afghans have died in the violence that followed the Koran burning, and there have been at least three assaults on American military personnel since thousands of Afghans took to the streets to protest.
The assaults on Americans took place in the Khogyani district of Nangarhar Province when a man in an Afghan Army uniform shot and killed two American soldiers; in Kunduz Province, where a grenade thrown by protesters near a base wounded at least six American service members; and in Kabul where two American military officers were shot in the head by an Afghan assailant who entered a secure area of the Interior Ministry where the two were working.
The third, purely Afghan investigation is by a task force that includes members of Afghanistan’s Ulema Council and some Parliament members. The Ulema is the pre-eminent religious authority in the country and is made up of scholarly mullahs.
In violence around the country on Wednesday, a suicide bomber drove a vehicle into a convoy of a NATO provincial reconstruction team in Lashkar Gah in Helmand Province in the south, wounding at least six people, while a car bomb outside a bank in Takhar Province in northern Afghanistan wounded 12 people, government and police officials said.
Separately, an explosion in the Nawa district of Helmand Province on Monday night in the home of a man suspected of being associated with the Taliban killed the man’s wife and six children, a police official confirmed Wednesday. The official said investigators were trying to determine whether the home was used for manufacturing bombs.
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