Protests in Afghanistan

US, Nato allies should have learned after a decade in Afghanistan that the Quran needs to be treated with respect.

If there is one thing that the US and its Nato allies should have learned after more than a decade of waging war in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries, it is that the Holy Quran is a sacred book and needs to be treated with the utmost reverence and respect. When attention-mongering American pastor, Terry Jones burned a copy of the Holy Quran last year, it triggered deadly protests across Afghanistan, with nine people killed in Mazar-e-Sharif. Similarly, after Newsweek published a story in 2005, erroneous as it turned out, claiming that guards at Guantanamo had flushed copies of the Holy Quran down a toilet to rattle prisoners, there were protests throughout the Muslim world and scores of people were killed. Now, this has happened again, with US and Nato troops at Bagram airbase accused of incinerating copies of the Holy Quran. And once again, the protests have turned violent.

Nato has announced that it will train all of its 130,000 troops in Afghanistan on the proper method of handling the Holy Book. Why it has taken them a decade to train its soldiers about this most sensitive of issues — and one which threatens to explode at any time — is anybody’s guess. But as insensitive and thoughtless as the Nato forces have been, the violent reaction of the protesters is something that perhaps could have been avoided — not least because it tends to take away, somewhat, from what the Nato and American troops have done.

One would have thought that with the passage of time, and after the very serious — and rightly so — reaction to incidents like Abu Ghraib or the various other cases of human rights violations of prisoners (some even at Bagram), the Americans and their Nato partners would have learnt that these are things that should be completely eliminated at their own end. The reaction to what happened at Bagram some days ago is understandable and in that, the remarks made by some of the protesters should be understood carefully (and hopefully lessons learnt) when they said that while they are not at all like the Taliban, “when the Americans do something like this, we will also rise up and protest”.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 24^th, 2012.