Taliban Manual Says Mulla Omar Rules

Mulla Omar has released a pocket book outlining the rules of conduct for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The unimaginatively titled manual "The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Rules for Mujahideen" can be seen as an attempt to reign in rougue criminal bands acting in the Taliban's name, and restore central control in the hands of Mulla Omar. It strictly forbids the exchange of hostages for money and says a regional religious authority should always decide the fate of individual captives.
The Manual condemns excessive suicide attacks, saying it should be reserved for "High value targets", and urges fighters to make sure civilians are not hurt in operations. The part about civilians is almost identical to US General McChrystal's announcements about the necessity to win the hearts of the afghan population.
Interestingly the manual also stresses regulating fighters under one command. It says that when mujahedin fighters meet or hear of fighters that don't answer to any of Mulla Omar's religious representatives, they should be made to submit to the chain of command or be disarmed.
This may be the beginning of new infighting, turning Mulla Omar controlled Taliban against criminal bands previously operating under the Taliban umbrella. But it might be premature to suppose, like al Jazeera, that this would make the Taliban weaker, as poor afghans join the ranks of the groups that pay the best, ie. those financed with kidnapping and drugs.
After all, the Taliban's first violent actions were as a vigilante group metering out on the spot justice for roving bands of fighters committing rape, robbery and theft in the nineties. A return to crimefighting and a strong central command might actually benefit the Taliban's image as they try to woe political figures and ordinary people scared of the random criminal acts of both the unreliable afghan police and the Taliban.

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.