Re: What is a Taliban ? - What is an Al-Qaeda ?
QUOTE *******************
A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
1. Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.
**************************
We are in a bit of a dilema in labelling these fighters. The reality of Afghanistan is that there was no regular standing army as is being written of in the excerpts from Geneva convention. They mostly qualify per point 1 above.
Afghanistan 'military' as such, was nothing more that a loose knit alliance of armed factions. The 'Taliban' were in effect the 'people' mostly in control of the country & practically anyone whoose leaders (incl Bin Laden) who swore alliegence or an oath (which we are told these factions did) to Taliban leadership, are at a basic level all 'Taliban' soldiers.
It appears that the Al-Qaeda fighters were directed by Bin Laden as their 'tribal' leader & that this group consisted of a lot of oseas voluteers.
It is us in the west who are arbitarily making a serious distinction between what an Al-Qaeda is vs what a Talibani is. This suits our purposes & as far as capturing fighters in Afghanistan, the more of them we can call Al-Qaeda, I'm sure we will.
This seperation is not unlike the distinction we made between the Iraqi forces where we labelled the 'bad guys' as the Republican guard & the others as Iraqi regular army. The toughest treatment in Iraq was directed at units of the Republican guard, but at least they fitted the requirements of the geneva convention in defining identifiable army units.
The definitions of the Afghanis is a bit murky but by any normal definition these fighters are POWs - any people who were involved in covert ops (such as planning attacks on civillians & US non-military targets can easily be called spies & terrorists - this is where the dilema seems to be - who was which ?
Doug
Edited by
dmarker2
Jan. 24, 2002, 08:36:04 PM EST
Edited by
dmarker2
Jan. 24, 2002, 08:37:57 PM EST
Edited by
dmarker2
Jan. 24, 2002, 08:40:02 PM EST
Re: What is a Taliban ? - What is an Al-Qaeda ?
QUOTE *******************
A. Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
1. Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.
**************************
We are in a bit of a dilema in labelling these fighters. The reality of Afghanistan is that there was no regular standing army as is being written of in the excerpts from Geneva convention. They mostly qualify per point 1 above.
Afghanistan 'military' as such, was nothing more that a loose knit alliance of armed factions. The 'Taliban' were in effect the 'people' mostly in control of the country & practically anyone whoose leaders (incl Bin Laden) who swore alliegence or an oath (which we are told these factions did) to Taliban leadership, are at a basic level all 'Taliban' soldiers.
It appears that the Al-Qaeda fighters were directed by Bin Laden as their 'tribal' leader & that this group consisted of a lot of oseas voluteers.
It is us in the west who are arbitarily making a serious distinction between what an Al-Qaeda is vs what a Talibani is. This suits our purposes & as far as capturing fighters in Afghanistan, the more of them we can call Al-Qaeda, I'm sure we will.
This seperation is not unlike the distinction we made between the Iraqi forces where we labelled the 'bad guys' as the Republican guard & the others as Iraqi regular army. The toughest treatment in Iraq was directed at units of the Republican guard, but at least they fitted the requirements of the geneva convention in defining identifiable army units.
The definitions of the Afghanis is a bit murky but by any normal definition these fighters are POWs - any people who were involved in covert ops (such as planning attacks on civillians & US non-military targets can easily be called spies & terrorists - this is where the dilema seems to be - who was which ?
Doug
