ON Saturday, May 14, several hundred people gathered in the windswept main street of Qalat, the capital of Zabul Province in southern Afghanistan. Led by local religious leaders, the crowd chanted slogans protesting the supposed desecration of the Koran by interrogators at the detention center run by the United States at Guantánamo Bay, as reported in the May 9 issue of Newsweek. Unlike protests widely covered in the news media, this one was peaceful and broke up after about an hour. And there lies a paradox: Zabul is one of the country's most conservative and anti-Western provinces. Only a few...