NATO Strategy Change in the Stan?

This should set NATO Headquarters buzzing.

NATO High Commander Issues Illegitimate Order to Kill Link

First thought was that it was a crap article and that somebody was making hay but then the Reuters UK showed up with an article titled “NATO orders leak probe after Afghan drug report”

Little hard to say it’s not a real report when you are ordering a probe into how it happened to get released into the public domain. And Reuters is a little more reputable than say the Daily Mail

Pretty far reaching ramifications of the policy change if true. What I don’t understand is after so many years of learning that kinetic approaches to COIN are not necessarily the best approach, why is SACEUR (Craddock )trying to escalate this thing in this manner? We can already see how some of the subordinate NATO commanders (including another American) feel about the policy change from the article.

I’ll wager that this is normal NATO policy development and that the “order” was actually a draft sheet sent out for comment, before he submitted it formally to the Military Committee for endorsement. The quoting of a response from McKiernan’s Kabul headquarters tends to reinforce that notion, of policy development, and that this was not actually a real order. Of course that doesn’t make nearly as good headlines.

Edited to get the links to work