Artful Dodger:

> the Koran burning upset our Muslim allies in Afghanistan

The truth is that this points to the sorry state that Afghanistan is in.

This is all the product of our western desire to get rid of communism in Afghanistan. When Afghanistan had its socialist revolution, they tried to do away with this kind of ignorance. The climate of fear of the Cold War caused our western governments to provide money, weapons and training to the Moujahaideen. Arab states in the Middle East openly called for a Jihad against the godless communists and over 100,000 volunteer insurgents swelled the ranks of the Moujahaideen. They were provided by weapons, training and military intelligence by several western governments, most notably the USA. Pakistan provided a base of operations from where these insurgents could be trained, armed and sent to fight over the mountains in Afghanistan. The Moujahaideen succeded in driving out the Soviet Union after sending 1 million Afghans to their deaths.

Today the same men who 20-30 years ago were fighting against the Soviet Union are now running the Taliban and Al Qaida. They wanted to create for themselves an extremist, fundamentalist Islamic state and they succeeded. After the 9-11 attacks the USA saw itself forced to take action against these people and now there is no end in sight to that conflict. I consider the current conflict in Afghanistan to be the aftermath of the Cold War. So are the confilcts in Rwanda and the People's Republic of Congo.

The killing of the UN workers was the product of insurgents infiltrating the ranks of what started as a peaceful protest. There have been a lot of protests in other places, not just Afghanistan. These insurgents are using the burning of the Koran as an excuse to terrorize foreign aid workers, and to cement the culture of fear that Afghanistan is grappling with.