German Pols Must Mention Afghanistan

Last Friday's air strike has catapulted Germany's Afghanistan mission right into the election campaign ahead of the Sept. 27 vote. German politicians are quick to make pledges of loyalty to NATO, but there are far too few signs of a critical reassessment of Germany's military mission.

Most Germans would like to see their country's military forces, the Bundeswehr, withdraw from Afghanistan -- and quickly. One could dismiss this as wishful thinking. Yet, with just three weeks to go to the German national election, the political parties have to take into account the mood in the country. There is a growing feeling of reservation in Germany about the mission, with many people asking: What are we actually doing over there?

This question has actually been central to German politics since January 2002, when German soldiers first deployed to Kabul. The historical reasons are well known: Germans in uniform don't exactly have a very good reputation internationally. But by the 1980s, Germans had become used to wearing casual clothes, working 35 hours a week and lounging on their IKEA sofas at the weekend. They finally seemed nice again and could bear to look themselves in the mirror.

Then, after the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany's Western allies soon began demanding that the Krauts dust off their uniforms once again. Yet Germany hadn't even been prepared for the fall of the Wall, never mind foreign missions by the Bundeswehr.

New Foreign Policy Was Never Internalized

When it came to demands for military assistance, the new Germany's NATO partners were not to be fobbed off with references to the darkest chapter of the 20th century. During the Balkan wars in the 1990s, they argued that Germany's total defeat in World War II did not mean that the British military airfield at Brize Norton and the American military cemetery in Arlington, Virginia should be the only places receiving coffins and body bags. In a world that had radically changed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, loyalty to the alliance did not consist of nice speeches but of a willingness to fight. The fact that the first German soldiers to be sent on a military mission abroad were deployed by a governing coalition that included both the center-left Social Democrats and the pacifist Green party was, therefore, one of the most remarkable decisions in German political history.