In the Absence of Grand Strategy: The German Debate Over Afghanistan

Cameron Abadi: The German Debate Over Afghanistan

THIS PAST February, the Bundestag overwhelmingly approved the continuation of the German mission in Afghanistan just as it has done every year since 2003. But it was a vote marked by two palpable differences from previous votes. For the first time, the members of one political grouping—the Left Party—protested on the floor of parliament and were subsequently barred from participating in the debate. The second difference was psychological and had potentially much more far-reaching effects: the debate was unmistakably informed, as it had never been before, by the knowledge that the country is engaged in a war.

The euphemisms for the Afghanistan war have finally been exhausted; Germans finally admit that their soldiers are not involved in a “peacekeeping” or “stabilization” mission or even in “conditions that resemble war.” German soldiers are—in the words of the German foreign minister—fighting in an “armed conflict.”

For six years, German politicians have preferred to not discuss the Afghanistan project, and when discussion has been unavoidable, they have usually condescended to the pacifist sensibilities of the population. But over the course of the past year, Germans have been forced to face the hard truths of their nation’s military mission in Afghanistan. In northern Afghanistan—where the German government insisted its troops be sent because of its reputation for relative peace—the Taliban have regained confidence, and many German soldiers have encountered roadside bombs and sudden firefights. In addition, the German sense of innocence collapsed after a September 4 air strike that resulted in the deaths of dozens of Afghan civilians.

The air strike was both a great human tragedy and an incalculable setback for Germany’s counterinsurgency strategy. But in Germany, it also led to a domestic political crisis that touches on one of the state’s most fundamental and grave responsibilities: deciding when war is justified and when it is not. In Germany, this crisis is particularly complicated as it is colored not only by Germany’s psychological inheritance of total war and unconditional defeat but also by the six years of accumulated neuroses caused by the nation’s dogged avoidance of this subject.

The atmosphere is now at once curiously abstract and jarringly hysterical. Incidents like the Left Party’s populist protest in the Bundestag—which didn’t engage the arguments for or against the army’s mandate to be in Afghanistan—are applauded by the public, however poorly they speak for the maturity of Germany’s political culture. Indeed, one comes away wondering not how the country will continue to justify participating in faraway wars (or in wars fought for humanitarian ends), but whether it has sufficient fortitude to mount any military defense at all.

TESTIFYING BEFORE a parliamentary committee investigating the Kunduz bombing, General Georg Klein said that in the moments after he ordered American planes to attack two hijacked fuel tankers, he retired to the chapel of the military base to pray over his decision. It’s instructive to remember that, at the moment, he still thought that the only casualties would be to Taliban fighters. But giving the order, in his words, “to eliminate” human life—even that of an acknowledged enemy—was, for this decorated professional soldier, a spiritual conflict. At least Klein felt it necessary to tell his domestic audience that his role of military officer was superseded by his identity as a Christian and empathetic fellow man.

This ambivalence is representative of the general discourse surrounding the war. In public debates, the Bundeswehr (Germany’s Federal Defense Forces) is almost always on the defensive. There is no equivalent to the ubiquitous call in America to “support our troops,” and only with difficulty can the military claim its successes are valuable or newsworthy. Meanwhile, its failures—like the Kunduz bombing—are manifestly compelling. There is also an additional burden placed on the soldiers: there is no special legal dispensation for the military’s mission in Afghanistan. Soldiers on the ground are subject to precisely the same criminal code as their fellow citizens at home and any time an Afghan dies as a result of German action, the killing is investigated by a public prosecutor in Germany. Until now, all investigations have determined that the killings were made in self-defense. But as nineteen-year-old soldier recently dispatched to Kunduz admitted to Die Zeit, “the soldiers who are sent to Afghanistan have one foot in prison, and one foot in the grave.”

To add to this, German politicians have often avoided explaining the nature—and the dangers—of the Afghanistan mission. Rather than make an effort to educate her public on matters of national security, Angela Merkel prefers to save her political capital for the sake of tax cuts and bank bailouts. As a result, she does not have the capital to be more assertive about military policy in in north Afghanistan. Deaths or injuries to German soldiers are not only a cause for national mourning but proof that the chancellor has not been truthful about Germany’s role in Afghanistan. Despite all the changes on the ground in Kunduz and the stories of corruption and incompetence in Kabul, Merkel has insisted that Germany is merely offering assistance to a government with effective control over its own territory.

THE DEBATE in Germany over the war in Afghanistan is at once grounded in the resolutions of the UN Security Council and strangely parochial: It doesn’t line up with similar debates in other countries. Germans, for instance, have long assigned a totemic significance to the distinction between the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission and the American-led Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF).

In Berlin, it is common knowledge that OEF was an expression of the Bush administration’s illegal and aggressive “war on terror,” while ISAF was the UN-approved multilateral reconstruction effort. The latter meant building schools for children and protecting women’s rights while the former was tied-up with unsavory drone attacks and civilian casualties.

But whatever Germany’s enthusiasm for this distinction, few of Germany’s allies have ever given any indication that it has any strategic import. And with President Obama’s repudiation of Bush’s rhetoric, and General Stanley McChrystal’s counter-insurgency approach, German policymakers can no longer claim privileged distance from the odious aspects of the OEF mission. This is not to say they pass on opportunities to do so: it is still the official platform of the Green Party that Germany should gradually wind down its participation in ISAF, while immediately terminating its role in OEF.

This stance may bewilder Americans—not least because they may remember that it was the Green Party’s own Joschka Fischer who, shortly after his 1999 swearing in as foreign minister, offered the most forthright moral defense for the NATO mission in Kosovo. “I didn’t just learn: never again war,” he said. “I also learned: never again Auschwitz.”

It would be incorrect, however, to remember this as an argument that was popular in his party or among the German public at large. Fischer was heckled and rebuked as a war criminal and was even attacked physically. Fischer managed to gain his party’s assent for participation in the Kosovo war, but only by resorting as much to political black-mail: he threatened to abandon the party and force the collapse of the government to which it had just been elected.

If there is a consensus to be found in Germany on war, it diverges sharply from Fischer’s perspective and is most popularly expressed by a considerably less likely object of public affection. The ninety-year old Helmut Schmidt, chancellor of West Germany in the late 1970s, does not have Fischer’s counter-cultural credibility. But what Schmidt does enjoy is unquestioned authority. He has cultivated a persona of charismatic no-nonsense, and his record of stoic public service and his personal experience of eras long receded and repressed–including the Second World War when he served as an enlisted soldier in the Wehrmacht–make his return to politics appealing to many Germans.

Younger Germans listen carefully when Schmidt speaks. When asked at a recent public forum in Berlin what he thought of Germany’s participation in humanitarian wars, Schmidt said, “With the baggage of Auschwitz, carrying the Second World War on our backs, we should not be the ones preaching tolerance to other societies.” The applause was spontaneous and extended. An older generation’s wisdom reinforced by the prejudices of the young.

Schmidt is too much the statesman to suggest an immediate withdrawal of German troops from Afghanistan. He, like most German politicians, policymakers and editorialists, stresses the need to stick with the mission so as not to endanger Germany’s reputation as a good ally to its NATO partners. But this suggests only a half-hearted commitment. It is hardly the sort of justification that promises a concerted national effort.

If German postwar foreign policy has been modeled on the basis of a strict adherence to international law, then it is also operating in the absence of an effective grand strategy. There is no feeling of national pride among the public that provides continuity between present sacrifices and far-off ends. Germany’s policymakers may have accepted principles of just war, but these have not been naturalized in the symbols of tradition and community. Their appeal is—rightly or wrongly—easily dismissed in favor of comfortable stasis.

Modern Germany, with its legacy of twentieth-century guilt, has few cultural resources that are unscathed by the country’s past, and there is little that can motivate productive activity on the world stage. Lacking the naïve exceptionalism of America and France, the German public doesn’t countenance a projection of German power elsewhere in the world: Germans have the capability but not the ethic. They don’t long for world leadership, and in those instances in which they exercise it–as in the European Union–they do so reluctantly.

Perhaps this is why Germany’s defense ministers have rejected the idea of describing German soldiers killed in Afghanistan as having “fallen” in the line of duty rather than having merely died. It would bestow an honorific, suggesting that the soldiers died for their country, and would implicitly raise the question of not only its role in Afghanistan but also what the country might stand for. And for that question, no German politician—no matter how many parliamentary debates he or she has participated in—has any answer.

Cameron Abadi is associate editor of Foreign Policy.

(Homepage photo: Angela Merkel / Creative Commons 3.0 / Wikimedia Commons)