War is the great unmentionable in the German government’s narrative of the Bundeswehr mission in Afghanistan. Defence Minister Franz-Josef Jung doggedly insists on calling it a “stabilisation mission”, and soldiers killed in action are “victims of accidents”, rather than casualties of war. All of which doesn’t change the fact that in Afghanistan today, post-Cold War, post-9/11 and crisis-ridden Federal Germany is fighting, and possibly losing, the first protracted war in its 60-year history.
From its inception in 1955 until the mid-1990s, the Bundeswehr has never been a fighting army. Its primary purpose was deterrence in the context of the East-West conflict. Except for disaster relief, its soldiers never went outside the NATO area – and in a way the first shot fired in anger would have meant the failure of the Bundeswehr. Against the backdrop of World War II and the Holocaust, and within the context of Europe divided, Germany’s partners and its own political class, were by and large happy with things as they were. But all this was bound to change with the end of the Cold War, Germany’s democratic unification and the emergence of new threats. Although the 1991 Iraq war with its Operation Desert Storm went ahead without German military participation, the Bonn government paid a hefty price in financial contributions Instead. And Chancellor Helmut Kohl knew that this “chequebook diplomacy” was politically untenable in the long run, but there was still substantial resistance to any German military role “out-of-area” – Germany and Japan, ran the popular thesis in 1991, were supposed as “civilian powers” to stay out of such missions, and focus instead on financial and humanitarian instruments.
The wars in the Balkans accelerated change. In July 1994, Germany’s constitutional court produced a clear shift of interpretation when it approved out-of-area missions for the armed forces. Peacekeeping and stabilisation missions followed, mainly in former Yugoslavia, with Kosovo in 1999 the most intense one. A rubicon had been crossed: the fact that German soldiers went into action outside NATO would have been unthinkable 10 years before. It was only made possible by the protracted demands of Germany’s allies for greater military burden sharing. As to the Germans themselves, after unification in 1990 they would have preferred to become something like a big Switzerland.
Today, over 8.000 German soldiers are serving in countries like Kosovo, Bosnia, Lebanon, the Horn of Africa and several other places in Africa. But above all they are serving in Afghanistan, and if any single mission has begun to redefine the status quo after 1994, it is this. Following 9/11 and the brief U.S. war to oust the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, the Bundestag provided in late 2001 the mandate for German participation in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) – today around 4,400 soldiers, largely providing logistics for allied forces and making up two out of five Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in northern Afghanistan. Since the summer of 2008, this includes a Quick Reaction Force (QRF) to provide security for all forces in the north, while a small contingent of German special forces under U.S. command in the south has just been withdrawn.
German troops make up an important contribution to the stabilisation of the Karzai Government through their presence in the north, but dissatisfaction with their insufficient equipment, bureaucratic limitations and especially their rules of engagement (caveats) has grown in recent years. Under current rules, German forces cannot fire unless in self-defence, even if they have detected and identified Taliban forces. Consequently there were angry accusations in 2006 by British, Canadian and U.S. members of the North Atlantic Assembly against Germany’s alleged refusal to assist allied units in distress. Yet in the German media and among German politicians, American reliance on military force and the civilian casualties that have resulted from collateral damage, were more and more considered part of the problem rather than the solution.
A sizeable part of German public opinion has from the very beginning been against sending soldiers to Afghanistan. That proportion has in recent years increased to around two-thirds and could grow even bigger if casualties were to increase suddenly. The economic recession now taking hold is not likely to be helpful, and the Bundestag elections in September seem to preclude any dramatic increase in the mission's strength. The current mandate for Germany’s ISAF participation dated October 16, 2008 is valid for 14 months rather than the traditional 12 months, because of the Berlin coalition government’s laudable intention that the issue should be kept out of the election campaign. At the same time, the ISAF contribution was increased from around 3,400 troops to 4,400.
But in terms of what Germany could provide, considering its economic strength and its 285,000-strong armed forces, these are frankly no more than half-hearted measures, even if they reflect the broad consensus among the ruling Christian and Social Democrats coalition. They are largely meant to defuse the demands for a stronger military commitment that Germany will inevitably face from the incoming Obama administration and from other NATO allies. And they are just below the threshold that would probably spark a public debate about why German troops are in Afghanistan, and what Germany should and could do to help improve the situation there.
The sceptics’ arguments in such a debate are easy enough to predict, and indeed they are already being voiced by a number of politicians and journalists. In the blogosphere especially, there are calls that Germany should withdraw immediately or at least adopt a short-term exit strategy. The arguments most frequently advanced are that Afghanistan is a pre-modern, tribal and corrupt society that is incapable of grasping concepts like democracy as we understand it, and that there is no sense of nationhood on which a modern state could be founded. On top of that, the terrain is impossible to control, the real problem lies with neighbouring states like Pakistan, and for all these reasons “moderate” Taliban (who seem to be the only force capable of ruling the country) should be offered a deal for returning to power in exchange for a promise that Al Qaida would never again attack the West from Afghan territory.
Attractive as this may sound to many German ears, it is dangerous nonsense. German Opinion-formers should call to mind the 9/11 attacks, Madrid and London bombings and several failed plots in Germany itself in 2006 and 2007. They should point out the Afghan and Al Qaida connections in all these cases and reiterate and refine former German Defence Minister Peter Struck’s famous statement in 2002 that Germany’s security is being defended in the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
They should also point out how almost all of the above arguments were used in 2006, before the surge in Iraq, to prove that the war there against the insurgency was unwinnable. With all due respect for the differences between Iraq and Afghanistan, the Iraqi surge arguably holds a few lessons on how to turn the tide in Afghanistan. “More boots on the ground” is probably the most important of them, and under General Petraeus the chances of U.S. strategy and tactics taking a turn for the better have never been so good. That will include talking to the Taliban, but as with Sunni insurgents in Iraq the aim must be to win them over to NATO’s side but not to let them take over the country again.
The German debate should, above all, attempt to be honest about the idea of war, of killing and being killed for the sake of preserving civilisation in the West and the rest of the world. Germans have come a long way from their tremendous inhibitions in the early 1990s about the out-of-area use of military force. Now theirs is the biggest contribution to the mission in Afghanistan. But they have still to engage in an open and mature debate about waging war against an enemy that wants to destroy unless we destroy or disable him first.
A division of labour between Germany and its allies is unavoidable, considering the time it takes to build capabilities and change mentalities. But a pattern in which Germany concentrates on building infrastructure in the north while the allies, and above all the U.S., do the killing and the dying in the south, is unhealthy – even if successive U.S. administrations seem resigned to it. It will inevitably lead to renewed mutual recriminations: the collateral damage that is to some extent unavoidable causes moral condemnation in Germany, and therefore increases the pressure to withdraw. Casualties among American and other allied troops are equally unavoidable, but will cause anger among their own voters if this burden is not shared by Germans. So in the end Germany will have to move, so as to make the war effort in Afghanistan sustainable and success possible.