Flit’s Bruce Rolston takes issue with Rich Lowry’s National Review article “Geneva Absurdity“:

“I’ll say it again. The conventions explicitly protect anyone, in a uniform or not, who rises up in defense of their homeland. Whatever else you say about the average Taliban soldier, it’s fair to say that is what they were trying to do. The U.S. has some Taliban members under its power. The U.S. has previously promised the world it will conform to certain standards in dealing with its military prisoners. The path of the ‘consistent moral principle’ here has been clear since the outset…

Bruce’s argument throughout is that the Taliban Army is the national army of Afghanistan and is deserving therefore of Geneva protections (the suggestion being that this army is defending its homeland); but Lowry’s piece seems to operate under an opposite assumption — that the Taliban is an illegitimate occupying force within Afghanistan, and the Taliban “Army” (like the “Al Qaeda fighting forces”) is nothing but a loose collection of heavily armed criminal gangs.

Bruce does concede certain points:

Yes, the conventions implicitly exclude spies and saboteurs who are hiding among the civilian population. They could not, for instance, ever apply to Al Qaeda members operating in the United States, or anywhere outside the Taliban’s armed forces in Afghanistan, for that matter, or who actively supported those operations in Afghanistan. Straight Al Qaeda members, under this interpretation, are out, but the Taliban units fighting the Northern Alliance are still in.

This is tricky. When, for instance, does one become a “straight Al Qaeda member” instead of, say, a high-ranking Taliban member who uses Al Qaeda command-and-control equipment, money, and weapons to fight against the U.S. and its allies? Must one be a foreign-born fighter operating inside Afghanistan to be designated Al Qaeda? Or are Taliban soldiers who fight with (and are trained and commanded by) Al Qaeda forces always (essentially) exempt?

The battle here is over defining the players, it seems to me. Glenn Kinen believes this to be a snap given the Geneva criteria, but I’m not so certain the articles are equipped to handle this kind of new-fangled conflict.

[Yesterday, Milton discussed the reaction of our vocal European critics]

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