Afghanistan - Airstrikes against criminals

US policies in Afghanistan has been called into question by the new commander in charge of foreign forces. General Stanley McChrystal says there needs to be a "cultural shift" to avoid civilian deaths and create trust with the local population.
He replaces General David KcKiernan, an old-school cold war general who's main skill lies in moving entire divisions and overrunning a country in three weeks. Stanley McChystal is a Special Forces officer, much more proficient in battling the kind of sporadic guerilla attacks Afghanistan has been seeing. He was running special forces operations Iraq when his men tracked down and killed Abu Zarqawi. In a sense, he is more into police work than traditional warfare. A person who is not in a regular army or police force and is killing people is a criminal, and criminals don't form conventional frontlines that you can attack with airstrikes. This is where special forces often step in, or paramilitaries. When you need to do police work, keeping order and tracking down and taking criminals into custody, but know that those you are looking for probably have access to military weapons.
The question is if McChrystal is police enough, or if he and everybody else he commands are stuck in a military and ethnocentric way of thinking.
After all - and this is important - the new policy is in no grand way different than the one already in place. Civilians must always be respected. The problem is what soldiers on the ground really do when mortar shells are flying around them.
In the end it's all a question of where you draw the line between yourself and others. When you are an american soldier in a foreign land, probably never having been outside the US before, you will unconsciously respect local civilians less than your own comrades. You will have a strong attachment to the men around you who are wounded with you and save your back. And just about anybody else could be a potential danger to you. The same even happens in normal police forces, even when policing your own country, there is a corps spirit that for some eventually can lead to hatred and attacks on innocent civilians. The difference is that your local Bobby doesn't have access to airstrikes.