The Hugh Grant Connection

This column was written by John Sifton.

It all depends on your theory of cause and effect.

If you're a right-wing blogger or work in the White House (where blame beads off like water on a duck), the culprit was Newsweek. It was a minor "Periscope" item the magazine published in early May, about interrogators throwing Korans into toilets, which sparked the protests -- or so says the administration. The 10-sentence article contained an error, not about the underlying allegation but about whether a Pentagon source confirmed that the military was investigating the charges. The misstep, we are told, caused the bloodshed, which is why we ultimately needed Donald Rumsfeld to say, "People need to be very careful about what they say, just as they need to be careful about what they do."

The flip side of the story, preferred by most liberals, is that the Bush administration caused the riots by allowing rampant prison abuse to fester and failing to investigate past abuse -- including claims that interrogators did, in fact, throw Korans in the toilet to screw with detainees' heads. (FBI documents released this week show that Guantanamo detainees complained about a Koran-in-toilet incident as early as April 2002.)

But neither of these theories is really correct. In reality, the riots were caused by a kooky concatenation of causes and effects, including an underlying record of abuse by U.S. troops overseas, opportunistic Pakistani politicians, radical Islamists, Afghan university students, and British and American movie stars (more on that below).

There is no doubt that the administration's behavior set the tone for the protests, and that they likely wouldn't have occurred in a vacuum where there was not record of abuse. But the administration itself didn't foment the riots any more than Newsweek's editors shot the protesters. After all, complaints about abuse by U.S. personnel have been floating around since 2002: torture, including mock executions, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and sundry other humiliations; at least 40 dead prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq; checkpoint shootings and civilian casualties. The poor record is exacerbated by gross impunity (save for a few enlisted grunts thrown in the stockade). Why didn't Afghans riot long ago? What really happened here?

The story without heroes began, as many bad things have in recent years, in Pakistan. On May 6, a Pakistani politician named Imran Khan, a former cricket player turned politician, gave a press conference to criticize his country's military ruler, Pervez Musharaff. During the press conference, Imran waved around a copy of the Newsweek article detailing the Koran allegation, crying, "This is what the U.S. is doing -- desecrating the Koran." He also showed a copy of a cartoon that had appeared in The Washington Times portraying Pakistan as a dog being patted by the United States for cooperating in operations against al-Qaeda, noting that it was an insult to Pakistan.

It was an odd scene, as Imran is hardly a model of radical Islam. The national hero of Pakistan's first World Cup in cricket (in 1992), Imran in 1996 married a British heiress named Jemima Goldsmith, a friend of Princess Diana's. (Jemima Khan, as she came to be known, was a darling of the Pakistani press for a while, and used to visit us in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan back when I worked for a humanitarian agency there, before September 11.)

Elected to Pakistan's parliament in 2002, Imran hasn't cast a particularly formidable shadow as a politician. "Im the Dim," as he is known to some, is somewhat of a national laughingstock. (He once suggested as a solution to the Kashmir crisis that Kashmiris adopt Switzerland as a political model, based on its ethnic diversity.) However, there has been a certain amount of sympathy for him since earlier this year, when his wife left him -- for Hugh Grant. Pakistani gossip columns recently reported that Imran was seen in public with Goldie Hawn. Which begs the question: Was it Hugh Grant who, by cuckolding Imran and driving him further into political insanity, caused the riots? Or Goldie Hawn? Using the Bush administration's theories of causality, anything is possible.

What is clear, however, is that Imran's rant got the ball rolling. The Monday after his press conference, members of the Pakistani parliament, including radical Islamic fundamentalist parties, began raising the Koran issue in session, challenging the government to act. Pakistani Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri condemned the reported abuse in a press conference. All this news was then broadcast via radio into Afghanistan, and the next day protests broke out in the eastern city of Jalalabad. Protesters appear to have been genuinely outraged and were acting on their own initiative. Others had their ire whipped up by clerics in fiery sermons, and political and military factions in eastern Afghanistan were involved in fomenting some of the unrest.

In coming days the protests spread to several other cities, including Kabul. Protests broke out in other predominately Muslim countries later in the week. By the end of the week, almost 20 people had been killed, as protesters destroyed several government buildings and humanitarian-aid offices. Afghan police and army troops -- mostly former mujahideen troops with sketchy human-rights records who fought alongside the United States against the Taliban -- fired on the rioting protesters in several locations, but reportedly killed several innocent bystanders in the process.

The rest is history: Scott McClellan's mendacity, Newsweek's hand-wringing, bloggers' rage, pundits' rehashing, and Frank Rich writing it all up neatly in Sunday'sNew York Times. And now American Islamic groups are understandably furious over a new sign that appeared outside a Baptist church in North Carolina last week: "The Koran needs to be flushed." Meanwhile, back in Pakistan, Imran Khan is unapologetic about all the fuss, continuing to call on Pakistan to petition against the actions of the United States.

John Sifton is a researcher in Human Rights Watch's Asia division. He travels regularly to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

By John Sifton
Reprinted with permission from The American Prospect, 5 Broad Street, Boston, MA 02109. All rights reserved