Grief and Anger Over Killing of 21 Afghan Soldiers

A public outpouring of grief mixed with patriotic anger whipped through Afghanistan on Monday in the aftermath of the killings of 21 Afghan soldiers by Taliban insurgents in Kunar Province. Flown into Kabul by helicopter, the victims’ bodies were laid in repose at the military hospital here, in coffins draped with the Afghan flag and topped with bouquets of plastic flowers, as an honor guard stood at attention and a military band played a dirge. “The uniforms your brothers and sons wore were actually their burial shrouds,” Defense Minister Bismillah Khan Mohammadi told family members at the service, a day after the attack. “We will follow their path and defend their blood.” Much of the public anger was directed at President Hamid Karzai, who did not attend the memorial but canceled a planned trip to Sri Lanka in response to the attack, which he condemned “in the strongest possible terms.” Continue reading the main story RELATED COVERAGE Afghan soldiers at a checkpoint in the Ghaziabad district of Kunar Province where a Taliban attack on Sunday killed 21 soldiers in their bunks. President Hamid Karzai ordered an inquiry.Taliban Raid Afghan Army Base, Killing Soldiers in Their SleepFEB. 23, 2014 But complaints about Mr. Karzai have been piling up on social media, with a theme being that the president had been partial toward the Taliban, calling their fighters “brothers” and their dead “martyrs,” while doing little for Afghan government soldiers. Adela Raz, a deputy spokeswoman for Mr. Karzai, said that he had consistently referred to the Afghan soldiers as “martyrs” as well, and had ordered their families treated with respect. As a passive protest, numerous Afghan Facebook users changed their profile photographs to pictures of Afghan soldiers. Many who did not found themselves inundated with accusations of unpatriotic behavior. A video posted on the Facebook page of a member of Parliament, Baktash Siawash, showed the mother of a dead soldier weeping as she spurned the government’s payment of a death benefit, and Mr. Siawash weeping in return. It had attracted more than 137,000 “likes” by Monday, a huge number in a country with very low Internet coverage. Mr. Siawash has been staging a weeklong sit-in, pitching a tent in front of the parliamentary office building and vowing to stay until Mr. Karzai meets with families of soldiers killed in action, which he maintains the president has rarely done. “The president is not kind with our forces,” he said, “but very kind with our enemies.” Ms. Raz disputed that and said the president had met with the families of soldiers who were killed in the past, although in general the Defense Ministry deals with families of its fallen. In Asadabad, the capital of Kunar Province, in eastern Afghanistan, one civic activist, Abdullah Nizami, said wedding parties had voluntarily stopped playing music at their festivities out of respect for the dead soldiers. A tribal elder in the nearby Ghaziabad district said a backlash against the insurgents had begun. “People in Ghaziabad now say whoever’s family member is in the Taliban’s ranks, they must let the people know about it,” said the elder, Hajji Mir Kalam. On the national level, many people began raising money for the victims’ families to supplement the meager death benefit of 100,000 afghanis (about $1,800) that they normally receive. Amrullah Saleh, a former intelligence chief, announced that he had raised $10,000 in small contributions in less than a day, which he promised to match out of his pocket. And one of the leading presidential candidates, Zalmay Rassoul, said he had suspended his campaign for a day and would donate the money saved to the soldiers’ families. The anger toward Mr. Karzai seemed prompted by two events: his government’s release of 65 men from Bagram Prison on Feb. 14 over the strenuous objections of the American military, and the president’s reaction to the Feb. 17 killing of a former Taliban official, Mullah Abdul Raqeeb. Continue reading the main story Mr. Raqeeb was the former Taliban minister for refugees, and he participated in efforts to start talks between the Afghan government and the insurgents in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a few weeks ago. He was killed in Peshawar, Pakistan, after returning from Dubai. Mr. Karzai hailed him as a “martyr for peace” and arranged for a military helicopter to fly his body to his native Takhar Province, where government officials presided over his funeral and the president called Mr. Raqeeb’s father to express condolences. Mr. Karzai has gone to great lengths to try to encourage the Taliban to engage in talks with his government, and many of his statements seem aimed at convincing them of his sincerity. He has also broken off talks with the Americans on a long-term security pact that would allow foreign troops to remain in Afghanistan after this year. The pact is widely popular among many of Mr. Karzai’s supporters, and there is widespread nervousness about Afghan forces’ being left to fight the Taliban on their own. “I think President Karzai should stop his apologetic policy toward the Taliban and stop calling them his brothers,” said Jawed Kohistani, an Afghan military analyst in Kabul. People seemed particularly outraged by the manner of the soldiers’ deaths. All were reportedly shot in their sleep after Taliban insurgents overran their base in the Ghaziabad district on Sunday morning. The governor of Kunar Province, Shuja al-Mulk Jalala, said the guards on duty were apparently Taliban sympathizers and let them enter the base. It was the deadliest attack against the Afghan National Army since 2010. At a news conference on Monday, Gen. Zaher Azimi, the spokesman for the Defense Ministry, lashed out at Mr. Jalala, saying that he should focus on civilian matters, and that accounts of Taliban infiltration at the base were false. General Azimi said the Taliban had attacked with hundreds of fighters, many of them Arabs and Pakistanis, and overran the base. “There was no enemy infiltrator involved,” he said. “The soldiers fought until the last bullet.” While it is widely believed that Afghan Army casualties have been rising sharply over the past year, General Azimi declined to comment on that or to give any statistics. “We have decided we will not share the number of casualties with the media,” he said. He also threatened legal action against any officials who discuss military issues without permission.