KABUL - Two US officers were shot dead inside the Interior Ministry building here yesterday, and NATO responded by immediately pulling all military advisers out of Afghan ministries in Kabul, in a deepening of the crisis over the US military’s burning of Korans at a NATO army base.
The order by the NATO commander, General John R. Allen, came on the fifth day of virulent anti-American demonstrations across the country, and it was a clear sign of concern that the fury had reached deeply into even the Afghan security forces and ministries working most closely with the coalition.
Although there was no official statement that the gunman was an Afghan, in an e-mail sent to Western officials here from NATO headquarters the episode was described as “green on blue,’’ which is the military term used here when Afghan security forces turn their weapons on their Western military allies.
The killings, which happened within one of the most tightly secured areas of the ministry, add to the drumbeat of concern about a deepening animosity between civilians and militaries on both sides that had led to US and coalition forces being killed in increasing numbers even before the Koran burning ignited nationwide rioting. And, the pullout from the Afghan ministries suddenly called into question the coalitions’ entire strategy of joint operations with Afghan forces across the country, although Allen said NATO was still committed to fighting the war in Afghanistan.
“I condemn today’s attack at the Afghan Ministry of Interior that killed two of our coalition officers,’’ Allen said in a statement. The military had not yet found the person who carried out the shooting, he said, adding: “The perpetrator of this attack is a coward whose actions will not go unanswered. We are committed to our partnership with the government of Afghanistan to reach our common goal of a peaceful, stable, and secure Afghanistan in the near future.’’
The killings yesterday are only the latest chapter in the deteriorating relations between the Afghans and NATO, including an Afghan soldier’s recent killing of French troops that prompted the French to move up their withdrawal date, and outrage over a video that showed four US Marines urinating on bodies said to be those of Taliban fighters.
The Koran burning, however, has taken the animosity to a new level, eroding further the already attenuated trust between the Afghans and Americans. On Thursday, two US soldiers were shot to death by a member of the Afghan Army at a base in eastern Afghanistan, as protests about the Koran burning were raging outside the base.
“We’ve got this happening at the highest level of the ministry and at the boots-on-the-ground level,’’ said John Nagl, a fellow at the US Naval Academy and a former Army colonel who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. “The American strategy is to hand over responsibility as rapidly as we can to the Afghans, and this is going to require enormous trust between the Afghans and the Americans. And that’s now been violated on both sides, and we did it first.’’
The intensifying enmity toward the US presence in Afghanistan a decade into the war is casting into doubt a central plank of the Obama administration’s strategy to end the United States’ involvement in the war: a close working relationship between Afghan forces and advisers and trainers who are working to help the Afghans become ready to defend and police the country on their own. But it is also likely to have an immediate bearing on several critical negotiations with Afghan officials.
A US official in Washington said the unrest and shootings of US personnel by their Afghan counterparts would have a “huge’’ impact on a slew of discussions planned for the coming weeks among officials from the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, and other agencies. On the agenda of the various interagency meetings is the future of the main US prison in Afghanistan, the detention facility in Parwan, which President Hamid Karzai wants handed to Afghan control in less than a month; how to proceed with stalled negotiations over the Strategic Partnership Document that is intended to map out relations between Washington and Kabul after 2014; and the how large a pullout President Obama will announce at a NATO summit planned for May in Chicago.
The official cautioned that no one was “panicking,’’ but that the initial reaction to the growing hostility from Afghans was to convince more officials that the pace of the US drawdown needed to be hastened, and that the sooner the mission was transitioned to one of training and counterterrorism, the better.
“You look at this as clearly and objectively as you can, what you see is that we’re in a weaker position than we were maybe two or three or four weeks ago,’’ said the official, who asked not to be identified because he was discussing internal deliberations. “I’m not sure anyone knows the clear way forward. It’s gotten more and more complicated. It’s fraught.’’
The shootings came on another violent day, as thousands of Afghans incensed by the US military’s burning of Korans once again took to the streets in running clashes with the police that claimed the lives of another five Afghan protesters, officials said, while many more were wounded.
Chanting anti-American slogans calling for an end to NATO’s presence, the protesters also vented broader fury, storming offices of the Afghan government and the United Nations, leading to violent standoffs.
Officials said that four protesters were shot by the Afghan police after a crowd numbering in the thousands attacked the UN headquarters in Kunduz Province in the north, wrecking public buildings and stores. Those shootings left 51 others wounded, hospital officials said.
The Taliban was quick to claim responsibility for the shooting, saying one of its members had infiltrated the ministry. But the Taliban regularly claims responsibility for deaths of NATO forces. A Taliban spokesman also claimed the shooter was carrying a suicide vest, but that detail did not agree with any other reports.
The Afghan deaths yesterday added to the toll of 24 Afghans reported killed since Tuesday, when reports first emerged about the Korans.
NATO is still investigating what led to the decision to burn Korans and other religious texts, and the findings of that investigation will prove highly sensitive.
Early reports said that the books had inflammatory messages written in them from detained Taliban suspects. Most of the Qurans Koran that were rescued from the flames are still at Bagram Air Base in a locked container. They are viewed as evidence. A few of the Korans were taken out of the base by Afghan employees.