JIRA LDAP user must be an "administrator for the LDAP engine"

In the JIRA Administrator's documentation, I noticed the following line:

Ensure that this is an administrator user for the LDAP engine. For 
example, in Active Directory the user will need to be a member of the 
built-in Administrators group.

Why would the LDAP user need to even have write access, let alone be an Administrator?

I'm using ActiveDirectory, and to get a user with that level of permissions will be difficult.