Taliban don't play by Dutch rules

Restraint can only take you so far. The reporter who wrote the story at the preceding link writes, just three days later, about another reality (read the whole piece):

Dutch patrol in Afghanistan is hit by a Taliban ambush

Captain Abdul Rakhman peered over a chest-high mud wall as gunfire and shouts rose to a crescendo. Beside him were two Afghan Army soldiers and a Dutch marine. A few meters away another Afghan soldier knelt in the dirt, reloading a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

The patrol was stuck, enveloped in a poppy field in a Taliban ambush. Automatic rifle fire came toward them from a tree line about 175 meters, or 575 feet, to the west and from a row of mud-walled Afghan houses to the east and north.

The captain and the sergeant had dashed here when the shooting began six minutes before, leading an Afghan squad to cover. Now neither side of the wall was safe. Bullets smacked the face of the dried mud beside them; the rest of the squad was lying exposed in the field. Taliban fighters were on both flanks. More bullets whirred by.

The marine turned toward a building. "O.K.," he said. "Go! Go! Go!" The squad began to fall back.

This intensive firefight, across poppy fields and against a fast-moving group of insurgents, began a 38-minute withdrawal under fire from a village out of the Afghan government's control, like many here in the overwhelmingly Pashtun provinces of central, southern and eastern Afghanistan. It also showed some of the strengths and weaknesses of the Taliban fighters, who fought fiercely but made mistakes of their own.

The patrol, an Afghan squad supported by a Dutch mechanized infantry platoon, had set out about an hour earlier from Poentjak, in Uruzgan Province, an isolated region of arid mountains and cultivated valleys that is one of the areas where the Taliban originated. The family of Mullah Omar, the Taliban's leader, comes from Uruzgan. Poentjak, the northernmost Dutch position in the province, is a heavily fortified outpost near the Baluchi Valley, which the Taliban control...

The Afghans and Dutch were in view of one another, spread along 450 meters of road. Lieutenant Marcel, who had only a few dozen troops to cover the pinned soldiers and to defend the base, gave the order to withdraw. A Dutch soldier near him fell, struck near the neck. Medics rushed to him, and began treating him on the grass...

Word of the wounded Dutch soldier passed among the troops. He had been struck by the casings of a round fired from a 25-millimeter cannon, Lieutenant Marcel said, making him a victim of friendly fire. His wound was not severe...

Note the "Multimedia" on the left.

I suspect Haroon Siddiqui of the Toronto Star missed the story:

...there's a Dutch contingent in south-central Afghanistan that is not waiting for peace to break out before trying the non-military approach.

"We are not here to fight the Taliban; we are here to make the Taliban irrelevant," its commander, Col. Hans van Griesven, told The New York Times.

Avoiding combat and ensuring no harm to civilians, his 2,000 troops have been repairing hospitals, schools and mosques. They have not suffered a single casualty in nine months in an area also controlled by the Taliban...