WASHINGTON, June 8 (UPI) -- Taliban insurgents are challenging U.S.-led forces for the moral high ground in Afghanistan by avoiding mass casualty attacks and calling for an international commission to investigate civilian deaths in the conflict.

Analysts and experts say the battle for this vital hearts-and-minds territory is the key to winning the war in Afghanistan, and U.S. and NATO forces are handicapped in it.

They are held to higher standards by the local population, and have had problems with their system of payments to assist non-combatant victims of the fighting...

U.S. and NATO forces "are quite rightly being held to a higher standard" on the question, analyst Peter Bergen of Georgetown University and the New America Foundation told UPI.

As an example, he contrasted the reaction when a U.S. military vehicle killed six people in a road traffic accident in May 2006 -- sparking widespread rioting and anti-Western violence -- with the absence of reaction to the killing of nearly two dozen civilians by a suicide bomb attack aimed at Bagram airbase during a visit this year by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

"There tends to be a lot less outrage from Afghans when the Taliban kill civilians," he said. As a result, U.S. and NATO forces had a steeper hill to climb in terms of how Afghans perceive the civilian casualties issue...

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