Afghanistan Watch: Germany's Afghan conundrum

October 16, 2007

Germany's Afghan conundrum

Last week Germany voted by a 2 to 1 margin to sustain the deployment of its 3,000 strong forces in Afghanistan--for now. But how sustainable is this mission when the public at large opposes the deployment by the same margin?

Ulf Gartzke, in an op-ed today in the Globe and Mail argues that Angela Merkel (along with other NATO heads of state) "can no longer afford to avoid engaging in a fundamental public discussion of why losses in Afghanistan are justified in terms of our core national security interests." Merkel has stayed out of the Germany's Afghanistan debate, but this "defensive, reactive strategy ultimately carries huge political and security risks, both at home and abroad."

So long as the mission is seen in Germany as George Bush's war, it will remain unpopular and could be a liability in 2009. But there is no better reminder in the threat a failed Afghanistan would leave for Germany than the recent -- derailed at the last minute -- to set off a series of massive car bombs in a Frankfurt airport that handles 5 million passengers a month. The terrorists plotting that attack, Gartzke notes, were Islamic terrorists trained along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

German lessons: the Afghan conundrum (The Globe and Mail) by Ulf Gartzke, Special to Globe and Mail Update, Oct 16: Last Friday, the German parliament extended the Bundeswehr's 3,100-strong ISAF mandate in Afghanistan for another year. ...For Chancellor Angela Merkel and her conservative allies, the Bundeswehr's bloody, seemingly open-ended Afghan engagement is a political time bomb that could go off in the run-up to the next federal elections, to be held by 2009.

So far, only the post-Communist Left Party is calling for a pullout. But left-wing MPs from the Social Democratic Party and even a growing number of MPs from their conservative Christian Democratic Union-Christian Social Union coalition partners, under strong pressure from constituents, are increasingly skeptical of the Afghan mission. Given this highly charged domestic political context, international demands that German troops deploy beyond the "safe" parts of northern Afghanistan to support terrorist-hunting operations in the south are not only misplaced but also play into the hands of those who want a swift German pullout.

First of all, the north is not a safe area. Suicide attacks on German forces there have increased sharply in recent weeks and months, bringing the total body count to 21. Second, if Germany's continued Afghan presence were to be seen as the result of conforming to U.S. pressure, the public diplomacy case for sustaining the mission would certainly be lost at the hands of left-wing demagogues, who are waiting to play the potent card of latent anti-Americanism. There is already a growing German perception that the Afghanistan mission forms part of George W. Bush's "war on terror" crusade.

Finally, any move to significantly reduce or withdraw its deployment could cause a dangerous chain reaction across the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. German politicians and public opinion are following the Afghan debates in Canada, the Netherlands and elsewhere quite closely, and vice versa. After all, no country wants to be the last to sacrifice troops for a lost cause when others are already beginning to retreat.

So how can this conundrum be solved? In essence, there are two options. The first — politically tempting but strategically dangerous — would be for the allies to cave in to public pressures and pull out of Afghanistan. In the short term such a move would defuse the concerns of disgruntled voters who no longer believe in the moral legitimacy and military necessity of the Afghan intervention the way they did shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The huge risk, of course, is allowing Afghanistan to revert to a failed-state haven for international terrorists and drug lords.

The second option is to go on the offensive and try to convince domestic public opinion that Afghanistan is still worth fighting for. For instance, Germany narrowly escaped disaster a few weeks ago when a group of Islamic terrorists, trained at al-Qaeda camps along the Afghan-Pakistani border, were arrested before they could set off massive car bombs at airports in Frankfurt on Sept. 11. But making the case for the mission directly to the public is a politically risky strategy that demands honesty and strong leadership. The brutal truth is that we are unlikely to successfully transform Afghanistan into a thriving Western-style democracy. Rather, the litmus test should be to make sure that the country can never again serve as a safe haven for international terrorism.

Political leaders from the NATO countries involved can no longer afford to avoid engaging in a fundamental public discussion of why losses in Afghanistan are justified in terms of our core national security interests. So far, Ms. Merkel has successfully managed to stay out of Germany's acrimonious Afghanistan debate, opting instead to bask in her many foreign-policy accomplishments. But with al-Qaeda and the Taliban on the rise in Afghanistan, and increasing domestic opposition to the German deployment there, a defensive, reactive strategy ultimately carries huge political and security risks, both at home and abroad.

Ulf Gartzke is a visiting scholar at the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University in Washington.