Officials reject proselytizing allegations

A report broadcast by the Arab news network Al Jazeera about U.S. servicemembers proselytizing in Afghanistan is just plain wrong, Pentagon officials said Monday.

The Al Jazeera story showed an evangelical religious service on Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan and a discussion about distributing Bibles that had been translated into Dari and Pashtu - Afghanistan's two major languages.

"American servicemembers are allowed to hold religious services," a DoD official speaking on background said. "The clip shows one of those services with an American chaplain leading a religious service for American servicemembers. In it, he spoke generically about the evangelical faith. That's all there was to it."

The chaplain did not urge servicemembers to go among the Afghan people and attempt to gain converts to Christianity, the official said.

In the second instance, a young sergeant received a shipment of Bibles translated into Dari and Pashtu from his church in the United States. The film showed a discussion about the Bibles. "What it did not show was the chaplain counseling the young sergeant that distributing the Bibles was against U.S. Central Command's General Order No. 1," the official said. The chaplain confiscated the Bibles. "As far as we know, none ever got off base."

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, when asked about the May 2008 incident, said, "It certainly is - from the United States military's perspective - not our position to ever push any specific kind of religion, period," Mullen said.