Mystery of the Burned Bagram Korans, Part 2: The riots

Hekmatyar is responsible for deliberately slaughtering roughly 50,000 Kabuli civilians during his bombardments of the city during the extermination campaign westerners still quaintly refer to as the “Afghan civil war,” that hellish ISI-wrought, Khomeinist-contested and Saudi-funded interregnum between the Red Army’s massacres and the Taliban despotism.

Terry Glavin tries to see behind the dust kicked up by the Koran burning riots in Afghanistan, and with help from Amrullah Saleh spies a pattern that first manifested clearly in the deadly Mazar-i-Sharif riots last year:

An Equal Opportunity Butcher Returns to Afghanistan
by Terry Glavin
The National Post [Canada]
February 27, 2012

In a column in the Ottawa Citizen I examined the shadowy and overlooked forces at work behind the latest bloodcurdling eruptions of what we’re all expected to believe are the offended religious sensibilities of those inscrutable Afghans. I relied mainly on some key observations the legendary Afghan spy chief Amrullah Saleh shared with me during a telephone conversation in the early hours of Thursday morning.

The script that’s playing out in the latest riots in Afghanistan is an almost play-by-play reenactment of last April’s berserking, which everyone was also expected to apprehend as eruptions of religious outrage, but which was also no such thing. For an elaboration of what was really going on last April, you can look it up in an essay I wrote for Dissent while the ashes in Mazar were still smouldering.

In my column, there is mention of the psychopathic mass-murderer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency also gets honourable mention, and I am not hesitant to reiterate here that no adequate remedy for the ISI may exist except to get rid of everyone above the rank of major.

To appreciate what follows, you’ll want to know straight away that Hekmatyar heads up the original faction of Hezb-e-Islami, an offshoot of which is well represented in Afghanistan’s Wolesi Jirga, and even in Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet, in the person of Economy Minister Abdul Hadi Arghandiwal.

You will also need to know that the ISI has declared that it is most pleased that the United States is setting up Mullah Omar’s Taliban in a fancy district of Qatar to begin the final forced “reconciliation” of the Afghan people with the genocidal Taliban high command. The ISI is seeing to it that Omar’s Haqqani wing will have Qatari office space of their own so that they won’t feel left out of the bargain.

And here’s Hekmatyar’s mouthpiece, immediately prior to the Koran riots: “If any groups are ignored in the peace talks, it would change to resistance force against the government and could be a major threat to Afghanistan,” Mr Baheer said. “Destabilizing Afghanistan is not a difficult task, it’s too easy.”

In other words, nice filthy little disgrace of a capitulation you’ve got going here, it would be a shame if anything happened to it, we want our piece. And with the right people in the right places, “destabilizing Afghanistan” is a very easy thing to do indeed.

I now introduce Afghan analyst Abdul Ali Faiq, who these days works in London with the European Campaign for Human Rights in Afghanistan. Abdul has closely tracked the trajectory of this past week’s protests and their locales, and he’s also closely monitored the local buzz and the factional polemics in Dari/Farsi and Pashto media. His findings stand in sharp contradiction to the story that most westerners are hearing about what’s going on. But they are perfectly consistent with Amrullah Saleh’s assessment.

The whole thing’s got Hekmatyar’s signatures all over it.

“What happened at Baghram, this is not a concern for the 29 million people of Afghanistan,” Faiq told me. Some soldiers mistakenly burned a Koran, it was a sad and regrettable mistake, even President Barack Obama is falling all over himself issuing groveling apologies. Most Afghans have their minds on other things. “They say, why should we care?”

One of Faiq’s key findings is that even in the Tajik and Hazara areas of the north – Kabul, Parwan, and so on – and in the Persian west – Herat, for instance – the specific locales of the violence and the slogans being shouted are associated with ethnic pockets of Pashtuns, but more importantly, with centres of Hezb-e-Islami.

“It’s a manipulation of the masses,” Faiq says. “It is Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami. This is a milking cow for them. They have made this drama. They made this scenario.”

Many Afghans are legitimately aggrieved by the sacrilegious aspect of the Bagram incident. But what most Afghans are more likely to notice is that it’s almost poetically emblematic of what a growing number of people across the country’s political, ethnic and religious divides now cannot help but conclude: the Obama administration holds them and their sorry little country in utter contempt, and he never did mean it when he said he was going to be the president who would take Afghanistan seriously for once.

The American surrender crept up so subtly, and was couched in such syrupy lies — of course all wars end in negotiations, of course all negotiations must be Afghan-led — that it was accomplished before most Afghans had even an inkling that they were being sold out.

You think it’s hard to figure out who’s who around the presidential palace in Kabul? Most North Americans and Europeans couldn’t tell you the first thing about who’s who around the Obama White House these days. Cut the Afghans some slack here. It’s taken them a while, but they’ve finally figured out that as far as the whole “Af-Pak” thing goes, it’s all Joe Biden, all the time, and he’s the dumbest American vice-president to come along since Dan Quayle.

My friend Sanjar Sohail, editor of the liberal Kabul daily Hasht-e Sohb, put it this way: “This is good for the Khomeinists, the ISI, and for Hezb-e Islami. If there was no Koran burning at the Bagram base, it would have been something else, and of course Hezb-e-Islami is benefiting from it.”

No serious person in Afghanistan has any doubt that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, if not living in a mansion in Rawalpindi within a short limousine ride from ISI HQ, is living in swank digs known to the ISI, somewhere, instead of spending his days at the International Criminal Court at the Hague on charges of crimes against humanity, which is where he belongs.

It should tell you something that the reason the ISI generals invented the Taliban in the first place was that they thought Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his Hezb-e-Islami were a bit too harsh. Hekmatyar had been the ISI’s most lavishly-funded war-criminal proxy all through the 1980s. The ISI wanted something a little less bloodthirsty, so in around 1994 they replaced him and Hezb with Mullah Omar and his Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Hekmatyar’s been ostensibly freelance ever since.

Hekmatyar is responsible for deliberately slaughtering roughly 50,000 Kabuli civilians during his bombardments of the city during the extermination campaign westerners still quaintly refer to as the “Afghan civil war,” that hellish ISI-wrought, Khomeinist-contested and Saudi-funded interregnum between the Red Army’s massacres and the Taliban despotism.

A Pashtun supremacist turned Stalinist, then drug-trafficker and drooling Islamist fanatic, Hekmatyar ran his Hezb faction in Leninist style, a habit he picked up from his days as a student at Kabul University, where he’d been jailed for two years for his part the murder of a Maoist rival. Hekmatyar is an equal-opportunity butcher. He was the gangster the ISI spent most of its American money on during the anti-Soviet jihad (although they say he never won a battle against the Soviets and that all his victims were Afghans) and was also the Saudis’ anointed proxy for a while, and has also been a frequent guest of Khomeinist Iran.

Hekmatyar rushed to Osama bin Laden’s aid after September 11. He brags about having helped Al Qaida forces escape through the Tora Bora mountains into Pakistan, and he brought Al Qaida fugitives back with him to Iran, where he wore out his welcome after a year or so. Dozens of the more deadly attacks carelessly attributed to the Taliban in recent years were Hekmatyar jobs. His Hezb gangsters have even carried off some spectacular whacks of Talib columns, just to prove they can do it. It was a Hekmatyar rocket that came close to killing Karzai at a military parade in Kabul in 2008.

We are supposed to believe the ISI doesn’t know his whereabouts, and we are supposed to believe the Americans will scruple about cutting Hekmatyar in on Obama’s new reconciliation and power-sharing action in Qatar. Believe what you like, but believe this: the vampire’s back in town.

Terry Glavin is a journalist and cofounder of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee.

Mystery of the Burned Bagram Korans: the plot thickens

Photo Caption: Afghan laborers who worked at the U.S. base in Bagram speak during an interview at a restaurant in Bagram north of Kabul February 23, 2012. In a small room near NATO's sprawling Bagram Airbase, Sayed Jamil fumes as he remembers how three U.S. soldiers ignored the pleas of fellow labourers not to burn dozens of copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book. REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail
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The excerpts I present below, from four news reports on the Koran burning incident at Bagram Airfield, present such striking discrepancies in the accounts of what transpired that a story that seemed so clear-cut at first (U.S. soldiers inadvertently burned Korans) qualifies as a genuine mystery. The mystery can't be chalked up to sloppy reporting; two of the reports -- the first and second ones I present -- represent two different stories.

If readers who were with this blog in the bad old days groan, 'Not another Chinese Pig Illness Mystery to solve' -- we had lots of data to pore over with that mystery, so of course we had to inch along day after day, week after week. There's not enough data publicly available at this point to even make a blindfolded stab at solving the Bagram Koran Burning mystery, but that shouldn't stop us from pondering anomalies in the anecdotal data that are available. The caveat is that it's such a mystery it might not turn out to be a mystery, but where's your sense of adventure?

The first excerpts I'll feature are taken from an Associated Press wire service report filed Tuesday, February 21 from Kabul, Afghanistan by Deb Riechmann; it seems to be the earliest comprehensive report on the Koran burning incident; in any event it was published by several press organizations and news websites as the 'breaking' news on the Koran incident, and it framed subsequent media discourse about the incident. (I'm not sure from the reports I've read whether the Koran burning took place at night on the 21st or in the wee hours of the 22nd.)
AP report via TIME magazine:

[...] Ahmad Zaki Zahed, chief of the provincial council, said U.S. military officials took him to a burn pit on the base where 60 to 70 books, including Korans, were recovered.

The books were used by detainees once incarcerated at the base, he said. "Some were all burned. Some were half-burned," Zahed said, adding that he did not know exactly how many Korans, the Muslim holy book, had been burned.

Zahed said five Afghans working at the pit told him that the religious books were in the garbage that two soldiers with the U.S.-led coalition transported to the pit in a truck late Monday night. When they realized the books were in the trash, the laborers worked to recover them, he said. "The laborers there showed me how their fingers were burned when they took the books out of the fire," he said.
[...]

Now I'll return to the Reuters report I featured it in its entirety in my February 26 post (Not Since Mazar-i-Sharif, or why the story of the Koran burning incident at Bagram Airfield is improbable), in which I also detailed a few of the questions I had about the workers' account of the incident. To review the salient passages from the Reuters report (published February 23) as they relate to the AP account.

(Clearly the meeting at the restaurant with the reporter, which took place inside Bagram Airfield underneath a photo of Masood, as cited in the Reuters caption, is not the interview site described in the report, although the photo of Masood seems to be ubiquitous. I'll assume the interview started at one site and finished at another but was described by the report as a single interview site for the sake of simplicity):

Afghan laborer recalls rage as he tried to save charred Korans

By Hamid Shalizi
(Writing by Rob Taylor, editing by Michael Georgy)

BAGRAM - In a small room near NATO's sprawling Bagram Airbase, Sayed Jamil fumes as he remembers how three U.S. soldiers ignored the pleas of fellow laborers not to burn dozens of copies of the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

Jamil, 22, was with other workers at a disposal centre inside the base when a woman and two men, wearing U.S. military uniforms, arrived on Monday in a truck piled with religious material and books.

While the vehicle was stopped at the centre gate, another laborer named Wali glanced in the back and saw the Korans, which the Americans dumped into an oven.
[...]
"I was ready to shed my blood and kill them or be killed," Jamil told Reuters, sitting in a heavy winter jacket, a checked scarf tied tight around his neck.

The laborers, after learning from Wali what was in the truck, rushed to the oven to stop what NATO has called a tragic blunder. Their account could not be independently verified, but was backed by local Afghan police and officials.

"We told the driver they were all religious materials and asked why they were burning them. The Americans said they were materials from prisons and they had orders to dispose of them," Jamil said.

The men plunged their hands into the oven to try to save the texts, some burning their fingers and hands as they pulled eight Koran copies from the fire, he said.

"The boys gathered and started shouting 'Allah u Akbar' (God is Greatest), clutching fragments of burning text to their chests," he said. "The truck fled the site with almost half the books still inside."
[...]
Jamil said U.S. soldiers were at first willing to allow them to take away the charred remains of the Korans, explaining how some parts made their way outside the base, but said arriving Afghan interpreters immediately realized the material could incite rage on the streets.

"The Americans first told us through the translators 'we don't want your Korans, take them away'. The Afghan "dog washers" intervened and told the Americans, 'If you let them take these books out, there will be a disaster'," he said.

Eventually freed with the material, the men ran out into the streets, waking people up and shouting about the transgression, which added fresh fuel to widespread anger that already exists over civilian deaths and intrusive NATO night raids.
[...]
Now sitting under a picture of one of Afghanistan's most famous heroes, the anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban fighter Ahmad Shah Masood, Jamil said he and the other laborers were afraid of retaliation by NATO or Afghan security forces.

"We have done a heroic job of saving and serving our religion. But we are also afraid of being taken and disappearing," he said. Others nearby offered support, including Afghan local officials and police, and a mullah who said they were heroes "whose faces should be famous."

"No one can touch you guys. All the people of Afghanistan stand by you. Don't be afraid," one government official said. Their material was handed to Afghan government officials for evidence, while their actions were praised by Karzai.
[...]

Now I'll turn to another Reuters report, published February 21 at 4:24 PM EST. The time suggests the report was filed in the early morning, Afghanistan time, which is 9-1/2 hours head of Eastern Time:

Afghans vent fury over Koran burning, U.S. apologizes

By Samar Zwak
(Additional reporting by Mirwais Harooni and Hamid Shalizi in Kabul; Writing by Michael Georgy and Rob Taylor; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Mohammad Zargham)

BAGRAM, Afghanistan (Reuters) - U.S. helicopters fired flares to disperse hundreds of angry Afghans who massed outside the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday after hearing staff there had burned copies of the Koran.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued an apology for "inappropriate treatment" of Islam's holy book at the base to try to contain fury over the incident - a public relations disaster for Washington as it tries to pacify the country ahead of the withdrawal of foreign troops in 2014.

White House spokesman Jay Carney later echoed his remarks, telling a briefing, "We apologize to the Afghan people and disapprove of such conduct in the strongest possible terms."

Protesters started to gather after Afghan laborers found charred remains of copies of the Koran as they collected rubbish from Bagram air base, the provincial governor's office said in a statement.

As many as 2,000 Afghans massed outside several gates to the base, the main centre for NATO-led forces just north of the capital Kabul, chanting anti-foreigner slogans and throwing stones, said Reuters reporters at the scene.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Taliban in Afghanistan condemned the incident, both of them saying the values of Islam had been "degraded".

Winning the hearts and minds of Afghans is critical to U.S. efforts to defeating the Taliban, but critics say Western forces often fail to grasp Afghanistan's religious and cultural sensitivities.

A senior U.S. official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said staff at Bagram had decided to remove "extremist literature" and other materials left in a library in the base's detention block.

"They (the materials) were taken out of the library for good reason but they were being disposed of in a bad way," the official said.

"There was a breakdown in judgment in this matter but there was no breakdown in our respect for Islam," the official added.

NATO ORDER

In a statement issued by the Pentagon, Panetta said NATO had ordered an investigation into the "deeply unfortunate" incident.

NATO's top general in Afghanistan, General John Allen, apologized for "actions" at the base and said a new order had been given to all coalition forces in Afghanistan to take part in training in the proper handling of religious materials.

"This was not intentional in any way," said Allen, the head of Afghanistan's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

"I offer my sincere apologies for any offence 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," he added.

The apologies did little to ease the anger.

"We want them out of our country now," said Zmari, 30, a protester who has a shop near Bagram.

"We Afghans don't want these Christians and infidels, they are the enemy of our soil, our honor and our Koran," said Haji Shirin, one of the protesters at the heavily fortified compound, which is home to 30,000 foreign troops and civilians.

"I urge all Muslims to sacrifice themselves in order to pull out these troops from this soil."

President Karzai's office condemned the incident and said the president had appointed a delegation of senior clerics to investigate how it occurred.
[...]

From that last it's unlikely Karzai's investigation represents the cutting edge in forensic evidence gathering and analysis. That would be most unfortunate given that a Koran burning is a blasphemy in Afghanistan and that penalties for blasphemy are among the harshest in the world and can include execution by hanging. I'll assume that U.S. troops would have immunity from such prosecution and penalty but I can see how Afghans who approve of their blasphemy law wouldn't agree to an exception in this case.

The fourth report, from the Christian Science Monitor, published February 22, nails down that the Pentagon has launched an investigation, although it's still unclear to me whether the investigation is independent of the one at NATO. I have heard at least one report subsequent to publication of the CSM report that calls into question whether NATO had actually confirmed that the Korans in question were from Parwan prison at Bagram, but the CSM report, which contains direct quotes, is so detailed on the point that I'll accept its version.

Again, I'm excerpting only the passages I find relevant to the other reports I quoted:

Quran burning: Were prisoners hiding extremist messages in books?

The Pentagon has launched an investigation into the Quran burning at a US detention facility in Afghanistan. Prisoners might have used the books to pass secret messages, a spokesman says.

By Anna Mulrine, Staff writer
February 22, 2012

The US military is now investigating whether American military officials ordered Qurans to be destroyed because prisoners at a US detention facility were passing extremist messages in them, an International Security Assistance Force spokesman said Wednesday.

“We haven’t got any proof of that yet, and that is a vital part of the investigation that is ongoing,” Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson said in a Pentagon briefing Wednesday.

Indeed, the entire library of the Parwan Detention Facility at Bagram Air Base, one of the largest US military facilities in Afghanistan, may have been ordered destroyed because of the extremist messages contained in texts, he added.

“It was a considerable amount of material,” General Jacobson said, though he added that he “cannot say” if it was the “entire” library.
[...]
Afghan night shift workers at Bagram attempted to stop the burning of the Qurans, showed the books to their day shift colleagues, and brought the Qurans off-base.

“That is when material left the facility,” Jacobson said.

In addition to extremist messages written on Qurans, prisoners at the US detention facility may have been circulating leaflets “that held inflammatory material,” Jacobsen said.

The question remains, he adds, “How did Qurans come into this material that was then taken into the burn pit?”

The investigation will also look into whether NATO officials exercised “misjudgment,” or knowingly gave the order to destroy Qurans. “Who basically told soldiers to take it and dispose of it in an improper way?” Jacobson said.
[...]

Koran burning riots, Day 5: Two US officers murdered at Afghan ministry; Allen recalls all Nato staff from ministries

Qur'an burning protests: Nato recalls staff after two officers are shot dead
Damien Pearse and agencies
February 25, 2012, 8:53 AM EST
The Guardian

Two American officers are killed at Afghanistan interior ministry as death toll in riots reaches at least 28

Nato has recalled all staff from government ministries in Afghanistan after two officers were shot dead in Kabul amid riots over the burning of Qur'ans at a US military base.

Two Americans – believed to be a major and a colonel – were killed at the heavily guarded interior ministry in the capital, where they worked.

General John Allen, the commander of Nato and US forces in Afghanistan, said he was recalling Nato personnel from the ministries in the capital Kabul "for obvious force protection reasons".

He said Nato was investigating the latest shooting and would pursue all leads to find the person responsible.

"The perpetrator of this attack is a coward whose actions will not go unanswered," the general added.

The shootings came as the death toll in anti-western riots across the east of Afghanistan rose to at least 28.

A spokeswoman for Nato's International Security Assistance Force confirmed two of its servicemen had been shot dead but declined to say if the killer was a member of the Afghan military or police.

Afghanistan's Taliban movement claimed responsibility for the shootings, which it said were in retaliation for the desecration of the Qur'ans at Bagram airfield, north of Kabul.

In a statement, the Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said the gunman was an insurgent named Abdul Rahman. He said that an accomplice in the ministry helped the gunman to get inside the compound.

The interior ministry is responsible for Afghanistan's police and security forces.

Early reports suggested that the two officers were shot in the ministry's command and control centre.

The British embassy in Kabul has withdrawn civilian mentors and advisers from the 20 government ministries and other institutions in the city as a temporary measure, the Foreign Office said on Saturday.

Elsewhere, protesters threw rocks at police, government buildings and a UN office following news that Qur'ans had been thrown into a fire pit used to burn rubbish at the Bagram base.

Four Afghans were killed in Kunduz province on Saturday and three in Logar, police said.

The US president, Barack Obama, said the burning was a terrible mistake, but the incident has sent thousands into the streets in this deeply religious country.

Hundreds of demonstrators staged peaceful protests in Nangarhar and Paktia provinces, but ones in Laghman, Kunduz and Logar provinces turned violent.

Laghman's police chief, Abdul Rahman Sarjang, said about 1,000 protesters threw stones at Afghan security forces, smashed windows of government buildings and tried to attack the governor's house in the provincial capital of Mehterlam. He said gunmen were among the protesters, but police did not fire their weapons into the crowd or the air because they did not want to incite the crowd further.

Mohammad Jawad, a university student who helped transport injured protesters to the hospital, said at least 20 people were wounded, mostly by bullets.

"Security forces opened fire on the crowd," he said.

In Kunduz, the capital of Kunduz province in north-east Afghanistan, more than 1,000 people protested, throwing stones at government buildings and a UN office, said the police spokesman Sarwer Hussaini. Officers fired guns into the air to try to disperse the crowd, he said.

Dr Saad Mukhtar, the health department director in Kunduz, said a number of protesters had died and 50 were injured during the demonstration.

Koran burning riots: Afghan security forces brace for Day 4 (UPDATED 2:15 PM)

UPDATE
Oh, fooey. The pix at Reuters showing a line of Afghan police in riot gear I linked to in the wee hours this morning has been replaced by a slide show of pix from the rioting. Of course Reuters would have kept updating the report and pix throughout the day; I just didn't think of that at the time I saw the pix of the Afghan police ready for the day's events. Oh well; the pix is probably still there somewhere. From the last Reuters update (1:47 PM ET), it looks as if the Kabul police did a pretty good job under the circumstances. Although the death tally for the day is 12, only two rioters were killed in Kabul -- and one of them, according to the police on the scene, was killed by armed rioters, who're taking refuge in shops after firing off their weapons. The police are unsure who shot the other rioter, but this is just why I'm not bothering with the pretense of referring to the unrest as 'protests.' The cats among the pigeons brought guns to the party. Okay; here's the Reuters link again' go there for the slide show and the latest rundown on major incidents across Afghanistan (and Pakistan) as the unrest happened on Day 4.
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BTW Kabul is 9 hours and 30 minutes ahead of Eastern U.S. time (EST). The picture of Afghan security forces in riot gear that accompanies this Reuters report (see below) has a strikingly modern look, even if the surroundings in the pix are a bit -- er, quaint. Bracing for large scale protests that include rioting in an urban setting is part of the shape of the modern world. Who would've thought 10 years ago that cities in Afghanistan would be in the thick of that world. An odd way to measure progress but a measure nonetheless.

So. Afghan security forces are getting a chance to test out their Western training in modern riot control techniques. Good luck, guys.

Afghanistan braces for fourth day of Koran protests
Reuters
Feb 24, 2012 2:48am EST

KABUL (Reuters) - Afghan riot police and soldiers were on guard across Kabul and other cities in a bid to stop a fourth day of violent protests, with authorities worried about incendiary Friday mosque sermons over the burning of Korans at a NATO base.

Friday is a holy day and the official weekly holiday and large crowds were expected at major mosques in the capital, with police in armed pick-up trucks guarding surrounding streets and buildings.

"Although peaceful demonstrations are the right of people, we strongly urge our countrymen to fully avoid turning them into violent ones," said Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi.

"Police are fully prepared to respond to situations," Sediqqi told Reuters.
[...]
In central Kabul, elite anti-riot officers in protective jackets and helmets secured intersections after complaints that security force numbers had been insufficient in protests so far that have left 11 people dead, including two American soldiers.

Troops and intelligence officials stood by in support, although most Westerners have been confined to their heavily fortified compounds, including at the sprawling U.S. embassy complex and other diplomatic missions.

The embassy in a message on the microblogging site Twitter urged U.S. citizens to "please be safe out there" and expanded movement restrictions to relatively peaceful northern provinces, where large demonstrations also occurred on Thursday, including the attempted storming of a Norwegian military base.

Demonstrations in the last three days drew thousands of angry Afghans to the streets, chanting "Death to America!," smashing shops and windows.

A large protest has already been planned for the eastern city of Jalalabad, where violent demonstrations have taken place in the last few days.

The Taliban urged Afghan security forces to "turn their guns on the foreign infidel invaders" and repeatedly urged Afghans to kill, beat and capture NATO soldiers.

(Reporting by Rob Taylor; Editing by Nick Macfie)