According to the German SPIEGEL, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) U.S. General John Craddock directed the troops in Afghanistan "to attack directly drug producers and facilities throughout Afghanistan."
He did not qualify that by saying only those drug producers where evidence proves that they are financing the resistance or the Taliban. If ISAF would follow the order that would be open warfare by its troops on the large part of the Afghan population that lives by farming opium.
Craddock's direct subordinate is the German army general Egon Ramms who commands the NATO’s Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum in The Netherlands and the ISAF forces in Afghanistan.
Ramms rejected the order, in writing, as illegal.
That alone would not be astonishing. Ramms recently gave an interview in the German magazine Stern (in German) about ISAF's mission (my translation):
Q: Where is what the U.S. military leadership refers to as the "kinetic aspect": the fighting and killing of the Taliban?
It can be no end in itself to bomb villages or to shoot at civilians. We shoot back when we are attacked. In essence, we only need to control the population centers were the people are concentrated. We do not need to cover the whole country side, but project security where the majority of the people live.
Q: How does this relate with the American dispatches which take pride to present the figures of how many insurgents they killed?
That contradicts any humanitarian thinking. We kill insurgents not as an end in itself! The counting of fatalities or the dispatches about them are the wrong approach.
That allegedly had his boss, U.S. General Craddock, miffed. The recent order and its rejection could be seen as a fight in that context.
But the Craddock order was also rejected by U.S. General David McKiernan, the commander on the ground responsible for ISAF and the separate U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
A classified letter issued by McKiernan's Kabul office in response claims that Craddock is trying to create a "new category" in the rules of engagement for dealing with opposing forces that would "seriously undermine the commitment ISAF has made to the Afghan people and the international community … to restrain our use of force and avoid civilian casualties to the greatest degree predictable."
Craddock's order is clearly illegal with regards to international law. There is no U.N. mandate to fight drugs by military means in Afghanistan and there are binding political decisions by all ISAF participant countries to not touch the drug business when it is not directly financing the Taliban.
The U.S. recently widened its rule of engagement for its separate, non-ISAF force in Afghanistan. But Craddock's boss, Secretary of War Gates limited that to cases where evidence is available:
"And I have signed off on a change in the rules of engagement for our own forces that essentially say the same thing. If we have evidence that the drug labs and drug lords are supporting the Taliban, then they're fair game."
Politicians in German and Afghanistan are up in arms about the Craddock order and politicians in other ISAF countries will surely follow. But instead of reacting to the outrage and the political damage it does to the coalition and the Afghanistan operation, Craddock now ordered a leak investigation.
A motive for that leak? Didn't Petraeus want the SACEUR job?
My bet is Craddock will be retired pretty soon.