http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/20/world/asia/20kabul.html?ref=world
The rules for this same type of engagement are in place in the United States today.
Can you see yourself being put into this same type of scenario because a neighbor was pist off at you, because your dog kept shitting on his lawn, and when he told you, you didn't do anything about it, so he turned you in.
Think it can't happen?
Now think economic hardship, and and all it takes to make a fast buck, is by telling a lie.
The tribal elders had traveled many hours to reach a windswept Afghan military base on the capital’s outskirts to sign their names to a piece of paper allowing them to bring their countrymen home from American detention.
Detainees who were deemed not a threat were released to Afghan tribal elders at a ceremony in Kabul.
The detainees and the elders must sign a pledge.
As an Afghan general read the document aloud, Cmdr. Dawood Zazai, a towering Pashtun tribal leader from Paktia Province who fought the Soviets, thumped his crutch for attention. Along with other elders, he did not like a clause in the document that said the detainees had been reasonably held based on intelligence. “I cannot sign this,” Commander Zazai said, thumping his crutch again. “I don’t know what that intelligence said; we did not see that intelligence. It is right that we are illiterate, but we are not blind.
“Who proved that these men were guilty?”
No one answered because Commander Zazai had just touched on the crux of the legal debate that has raged for nearly a decade in the United States: Does the United States have the legal right to hold, indefinitely without charge or trial, people captured on the battlefield? His question also exposed a fundamental disagreement between the Afghans and the American military about whether people had been fairly detained
The Afghan military made its own effort to solve the problem when it heard the elders’ protests, by simply writing in the word “no” in front of the phrase saying the detainee had a “link to the insurgency.” The version the elders signed said the detainee had “no link.”
In the shifting shadows of this often invisible war, where no one is sure who is lying and who is telling the truth, it seemed a reasonable way to resolve the day’s discord.
