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Seriously, how would you tell the difference between a group of Taliban with their mullah going to a mosque to pray and then strategize afterwards, and a group of men, armed for safety, that went to a mosque to pray and talk afterwards?
The uniforms? The kinds of weapons? Do they carry cards? Surely not the fact they were in a mosque? Not in a religion (theirs, at least) in which the church is the state and the higher the religious figure the more secular power he has.
Would Taliban force their wives and kids to stay from from prayers? (Granted, they'd make the women be separate, and likely stay separate, or at least well covered.) Do Taliban, or any other kind of insurgents, set up camps so that they're always living away from civilians?
The difference between a dead insurgent and a dead (male) civilian is mostly the intent of the guy before he was a corpse; sometimes there's a hint if he's clutching a weapon, but unless weapons are real common, his buddies are likely to reclaim it. Voila: the most hardened insurgent is now a civilian. Prove otherwise, without witnesses.
But are the people in the village going to say that the mosque bombing and death of their tribesmen, or of their guests, was okay? That there are insurgents lurking in their houses, thus all but asking more military action and more bombs? The pattern seems to be as follows: The US/Canadian/Afghan army is really in control of an area and a outsider reporter asks, the villagers complain about how horrible it was when the Taliban were around and how good the army is; when the Taliban are in charge, they tell the outsider reporter they never said anything bad about the Taliban, but how could they, the Taliban just pass through or are guests. In the Muslim press, the 'outsider Islamist reporter' gets the story about the atrocities committed by the army and how wonderful the Taliban are. You don't actually ever need to interview a villager: just figure out your status, and whether the Taliban or the army are dominant in an area ... you have the story--whatever it takes to (a) minimize the troubles, (b) get the guys with the guns to move on. Far too much xenophobia, Islamic supremacist thought, and tribalistic jingoism.
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