As I guessed, the Taliban were behind the riots and killings:
Police investigations into who did the actual killings during a week of riots and demonstrations protesting a Christian cleric in the United States burning a Koran (and accusing Islam of being a religion that encourages violence and hatred), kept coming up with the usual suspects. A few local Taliban supporters and radical clergy were at the center of each incident, and these people were often the ones who personally took the incidents from protest to murder. Some of the Taliban activists were supposed to be former Taliban, men who had accepted a government amnesty offer and were supposed to have become upstanding citizens.
This was enemy information warfare, designed to get us to say "screw you guys, we're going home."
Don't fall for it. We're beating these guys despite the defeatism in the press. Our press corps learned nothing from Iraq--which they believed was a fiasco until we gambled and amazingly won--and it shows.
