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Kandahar, Afghanistan. If the protesters who pushed this city to the brink last weekend were really worried about Koran burning, wondered Layloma Popal, the headmistress of this city's biggest girls' school, "then why did they try to burn down my school?"

"There were 10 Korans at least in there," Popal said, pointing to the charred remains of the Peace Room, where students learn about peace strategies for their war-torn country. "If we have more security in Kandahar these days, as they say, where was it?"

For three hours, the rioters — many members of the Taliban or their sympathizers — marauded around the campus of the Zarghona Ana High School for Girls, while the students hid in the bathrooms.

"We never saw the Afghan Army or the police or the foreign forces until after the rioters left," Popal said.

They were busy elsewhere. In an effort to quell the two days of disturbances, on Saturday and Sunday, the Kandahar police shot more than 123 protesters, and by the time the wounded either stabilized or died, the death toll had reached at least 13, according to hospital officials. Thousands of young men, waving Taliban flags and shouting slogans honoring the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, rampaged through the streets, setting tires on fire, looting and in some cases opening fire on the police. Two officers were killed.

The rioting exposed a fundamental quandary for the US war effort in Kandahar, the heartland of the insurgency, which Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top allied commander, has called "one of those very important places where Taliban momentum has been reversed."

If the insurgents have indeed retreated from crucial districts, and if security in the city is better than it was just months ago, when the Taliban carried out daily assassinations, then there is still a deep undercurrent of unease and discontent caused by the foreign presence, which the Taliban and their sympathizers were able to ignite with the simple spark provided by the burning of a Koran by a pastor in Florida.

The heavy security that has come with the influx of U.S. and Afghan troops has tamped down the daily violence that once plagued the city, but it has done little to resolve those underlying tensions, said Shahbuddin Akhundzada, a prominent religious scholar who has generally supported the U.S. role in Afghanistan.

"Now the people of Kandahar are under so much threat, there's so much pressure on them, they are afraid to do anything, they'll be arrested or killed," he said. "Then the slightest chance, like the Koran burning, and it all blows up."

There is a palpable sense of fear. A visiting male foreigner is asked to wear a head covering so as not to look like a foreigner. Akhundzada asked to meet in a neutral place, where no one would see him receiving foreign journalists.

At the Continental Guest House, normally bustling with foreign visitors and contractors, only two of the 50 room keys were off their hooks on Tuesday. The owner, Hajji Nasir Ahmed, said that was true even before the Koran-burning riots.

"If security were good, people would be coming, but it seems there is no security here, our business is totally stopped," he said.

Partly that is because many contractors working on development projects have moved into the sprawling Kandahar Air Field after a series of successful suicide attacks on U.S. Agency for International Development contractors and other foreign targets. To keep suicide bombers from approaching the base, pedestrian channels hemmed in by cyclone fencing and barbed wire are more than half a mile long now.

The provincial governor, Tooryalai Wesa, said in an interview Tuesday that the pro-Taliban element in the protests took the authorities by surprise, and the police at first did not always follow his orders to shoot in the air; four police officers have been arrested for firing too enthusiastically into crowds.

Most of the protesters, however, wanted to peacefully express their views about the Koran burning in Florida, he said.

The rioting was an exception to the general improvement in Kandahar, he said.

"It's very difficult, very peculiar to think that last year at this time we were unable to go to some of the districts right outside Kandahar," Wesa said.

Even the Dand district, only a few miles away, could be visited safely only with a military helicopter, he said.

Now there are government officials in many of the districts, and much of the Taliban infrastructure, like courts and prisons, safe houses and weapons caches, has been cleared out, he said.

One of the consequences of success in the rural districts, however, has been to drive the Taliban into the city, where it is easier for them to go underground and wait for an opportunity to strike back. The governor said the Afghan security forces were growing in size and ability to handle that threat, too.

"I'm not very worried about it," he said. "Our security situation is getting better."

One Kandahar resident, who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution, said: "Taliban are there, everyone knows it. No one knows when they are going to come out."

New York Times