Loved This Story

Germans uneasy over involvement in Afghanistan
By Peter O'Neil, Canwest News Europe CorrespondentMay 31, 2009
StoryPhotos ( 1 )
An Afghan girl travels with women in the back of a taxi at Bazaar e Panjwai in Kandahar, Afghanistan, May 28.Photograph by: Jorge Silva, ReutersGermans face constant reminders of the horrors their soldiers once inflicted on humanity. It starts with guilt-inducing history lessons in schools and continues with countless public monuments such as Berlin's Topography of Terror, an outdoor museum built above a former Gestapo torture chamber that includes photos of soldiers rounding up and executing civilians.


Small wonder, then, that leading politicians heading into autumn parliamentary elections are showing considerable unease over Germany's unpopular, and increasingly bloody, participation in Afghanistan conflict.


Germans for the first time are taking aggressive action against insurgents, who in turn are believed to be targeting the country's soldiers in hopes of exploiting Germans' long-standing aversion to seeing their citizens in uniforms firing guns.


"Germans have a very difficult attitude toward their own military," said University of Ottawa professor Christoph Zuercher, an Afghanistan specialist who previously taught at Berlin's Free University.


"It's mainstream, it prevails all across German society."


Zuercher said the leaders of the coalition government and rivals in the September vote, Chancellor Angela Merkel of the Christian Democrats and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier of the Social Democratic Party, are desperately trying to prevent Afghanistan from becoming an election issue.


"They're not going to talk about this issue unless they are forced to."


But that effort is becoming increasingly difficult as evidence mounts that the Taliban are deliberately targeting the 3,500 German soldiers - the third-largest troop contribution in Afghanistan - in the relatively peaceful northeast. The number of German targets will increase temporarily by several hundred when Germany adds several hundred more troops to supervise the summer elections.


That has forced Germany, which refuses to call the conflict a war and is a constant target of criticism from allies for keeping its soldiers out of harm's way, to take offensive actions against the enemy for the first time.


President Hamid Karzai recently praised German special forces for tracking and arresting a senior Taliban commander suspected of involvement in some of the 30 attacks against German troops since the start of the year.


German commandos also recently joined members of the Afghan National Army in an attack that left several insurgents dead.


Previously, Germans were required under one of their many "caveats" to not shoot on retreating enemy.


German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung's "claim that the Germans 'are not involved in a war there, but in a stabilization mission' is currently being refuted day after day," the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported last week.


The Germany military has been drawn into "a gruelling conflict in which soldiers are shooting, killing and dying," the magazine noted.


"A conflict in which the German army was to build bridges, plant trees and provide security has turned into a war."


Germany has lost only 32 troops since becoming one of the first members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to arrive in Afghanistan in 2002, the latest a 21-year-old soldier killed in a firefight on April 29.


That's just under one-quarter the number of deaths suffered by Canada, which currently has about 2,800 troops based in the far more volatile Kandahar region.


While Germany's political debate is dominated by the economic crisis, both The Left Party (Die Linke) and the Green Party are expected to try to make Afghanistan an issue in the campaign heading into the election to exploit growing violence, Zuercher said.


Germany's policy-makers and analysts "are increasingly pessimistic that the Afghanistan mission can be a success."


But Zuercher said it is not likely that the growing pressure could force a unilateral withdrawal of German troops, who are already limited by caveats that prevent many offensive actions against the insurgents.


Germany has been the subject of charm offensive by President Barack Obama, who drew a massive crowd in Berlin - and was compared to John F. Kennedy - during a visit last year during which he appealed for greater German effort in Afghanistan.


Germany's leaders would know that a pullout would be disastrous for its relationship with the U.S., though they would never state that due to long-standing anti-American sentiment that prevails despite Obama's popularity, Zuercher said.


Instead, Germany would frame a decision to remain in Afghanistan as part of a statement of "loyalty to the allies and NATO," since "Germany needs to prove itself a reliable and responsible member of the international community."


He said the growing violence in the north will likely ease pressure on Germany from Canada, the U.S. and Great Britain to send troops to the more dangerous southern regions, he said.


Despite being forced into a more robust and more perilous role, German politicians are likely to keep promoting the military's boy scout image one of the world's most dangerous countries, according to Zuercher.


"Any German government will be hard pressed to admit that German troops are in a war."

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service