Once combatants signal a clear desire to surrender, the other side must honor their request and grant them humane treatment afterward. That international legal principle is one vital oasis of humanity, one fragile guarantee of mercy, mankind has struggled to preserve when peace gives way to war.

Yet in Afghanistan, the right of surrender appears to be in serious peril - a development that will test the US commitment to enforcing humanitarian standards of behavior.

Recent days have brought several troubling reports. Reuters quoted a commander saying his unit had captured and executed 160 Taliban soldiers, mowing them down with machine gun fire.

Other accounts suggested that the bloody revolt of the Taliban prisoners held at the Qala Janghi fortress - a revolt whose brutal suppression resulted in the deaths of hundreds of prisoners, some of whose hands were tied behind their backs - may have come because the captives feared they faced summary execution.

The New York Times, meanwhile, described a convoy of trucks carrying 800 mistreated Taliban soldiers to an uncertain fate at the hands of Northern Alliance captors who easily forgive former foes if they are fellow Afghans but who despise foreigners fighting on Afghanistan soil.

The United States, however, has given short shrift to the issue of prisoners of war, with our top military officials saying, on the one hand, that the United States doesn't want the foreign soldiers to be allowed to slip away, but, on the other, that the country has neither capacity nor plans to hold prisoners ourselves.

After almost two months of a justified and necessary war that has gone more smoothly than anyone could have anticipated, that posture is a major mistake. We can't simply wash our hands of the matter, for how prisoners are treated speaks both to who we are as a people and the example we set as the world's leading democracy.

The issue is all the more crucial because the plight of the prisoners has created particular concern in Pakistan, now an antiterror ally but also home to many of the muddle-headed religious zealots, who, heeding the call for jihad, crossed the border and took up arms on behalf of the Taliban.

Still, that action alone doesn't transform them into terrorists, and probably doesn't even make them mercenaries.

Despite the Northern Alliance's contempt for those foreigners, the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners says that soldiers and volunteers must be treated humanely upon surrender.

''As a matter of law, anyone who qualifies under the Geneva Convention as a combatant, if they surrender, you have to accept that surrender,'' says Anne-Marie Slaughter, a professor of international law at Harvard Law School.

Although unlawful combatants - alleged spies or saboteurs, for example - can be tried and punished after capture, ''you have to prove that they are unlawful combatants. You can't just treat a whole class as criminals,'' Slaughter says. Lawful combatants must be repatriated after hostilities end.

A long history of warfare suggests that the United States can't leave it to the Northern Alliance to make fair distinctions between lawful and unlawful combatants, says Alfred Rubin, a professor of international law at Tuft's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. ''They are almost certain to find the prisoners to be criminals,'' says Rubin. If so, he adds, the blood from their brand of justice will be on our hands.

The prisoners' dilemma demands a strong and immediate response from the United States.

First, we must make it clear we expect those who lay down their arms to be treated according to the dictates of international law.

''I absolutely believe the United States should be asserting the standards that ought to be adhered to,'' says US Senator John Kerry. ''That should be part of our public approach.''

But that alone won't suffice. The United States either needs to put enough troops on the ground to guarantee the humane treatment of prisoners or ensure that a force under the United Nations auspices undertakes that role. And we must act before it's too late, for what we need in Afghanistan is not just a military victory, but a humanitarian one as well.

© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company

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