It was seen as retaliation for efforts by local people to drive out the Taliban by forming their own militia, which had organised the volleyball game.
Foreign lawyers here said China's behavior might also invite retaliation, hurting efforts by Chinese companies to invest abroad.
Both groups first gained widespread publicity in 2010 when they waged a series of coordinated cyberattacks in retaliation for efforts to shut down the Web site of the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks.
Until reliable missile defenses can be mounted without wrecking arms control, Washington should continue to meet threats from North Korea and Iran the way it met missile threats from Russia during the cold war -- through America's capacity for devastating retaliation and efforts to restrain the spread of nuclear materials and missile technology.
Workers called for a boycott of Ollie's Noodle Shop restaurants yesterday, claiming that the president of the popular restaurant chain was leading a retaliation and blacklisting effort against restaurant workers who are trying to organize.
Last week, the leader of the Qaeda wing, Abdelmalek Droukdal, threatened a "flagrant war" against France in retaliation for an effort by France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to ban burqas, the head-to-toe women's garments, which he called a symbol of "enslavement".
But Mark Vermeulen, one of the defense lawyers, countered that the acquittal on the assault charge, which charged that the pie-throwing was an act of retaliation and an effort to impede a public official from doing his job, was more important than the guilty verdict in the battery charge.
At one point, Aligismet Badalov, a journalist with the official newspaper, Khalg Gazeti, jumped up to defend an attempt earlier this year to blackmail an investigative reporter in retaliation for her efforts to expose government corruption, Khadija Ismayilova, who was secretly photographed having sex with her boyfriend.
Judge Locke noted that the labor board had not asserted that Wal-Mart's move to prepackaged meat was illegal retaliation against unionization efforts.
Local human rights and environmental groups have also suffered a wave of harassment and intimidation in retaliation to their efforts to investigate and derail the project.
