Dear Reader,
It is just over four years since German diplomats beat a hasty retreat from Kabul in the summer of 2021 as the Taliban closed in on the Afghan capital.
The state apparatus that NATO countries spent two decades and countless billions of dollars building collapsed within weeks before the Islamist group that had been ousted from power in 2001.
Since then, only Russia has fully re-established relations with the Islamist government. Western nations have kept their distance, dealing with the Taliban only indirectly through intermediaries such as Qatar.
Last Wednesday, however, a German government official returned to Kabul — a watershed moment, marking the first confirmed visit by a Western government representative to the Afghan capital since 2021.
While Berlin has remained tight-lipped about the details, the Afghan authorities described the meeting as “warm and positive”.
On the Afghan side, former Guantanamo Bay inmate Mohammad Nabi Omari hosted the visiting delegation. The United States once suspected Omari of links to al-Qaeda and detained him for 12 years without trial before releasing him in a 2014 prisoner exchange. Since 2022, he has served as deputy interior minister.
Who represented Germany remains unclear. In any case, the visiting German mission was deliberately low-ranking. Public broadcaster ARD described one German participant as “a head of department from the Interior Ministry with responsibility for the border police.” A Referatsleiter is a relatively senior civil servant, but not a political appointee. In other words, Germany sought to keep the meeting as unpolitical as possible: it was purely about logistical discussions.
The talks reportedly focused on deportation flights for Afghan nationals who have lost their right to remain in Germany. Following a terrorist attack on a market square in Mannheim last year—carried out by a radicalised Afghan man—Berlin has been under intense domestic pressure to remove Afghans deemed a security risk.
Last August, the Scholz government arranged a charter flight to return over two dozen convicted criminals to Kabul. As Berlin wished to avoid direct engagement with the Taliban, it asked Qatar to act as an intermediary.
This summer, new Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) repeated the trick, sending 81 Afghans back to Kabul on a charter flight. Again, all those deported were convicted offenders.
Now, Dobrindt wants such flights to become routine. His aim in dispatching officials to Kabul was to work out the logistical framework for deporting Afghans without having to rely on costly charter operations.
According to Der Spiegel, two German officials spent several days in the Afghan capital scouting out the airport and working on the details of federal-police escorts and handover procedures on arrival.
The Afghan authorities seem eager to cooperate.
“Afghan citizens who commit crimes in other countries are, of course, personally responsible for their actions. But they also represent the Afghan nation,” a spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Kabul told ARD. “They will be handed over to the Afghan Ministry of the Interior and dealt with according to Sharia law… We take this matter very seriously.”
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What’s the reaction been?
Left-wing opposition parties in the Bundestag have accused Dobrindt of cosying up to terrorists.
“By signing an agreement with the Taliban, Dobrindt is making himself dependent on an Islamist organisation and granting it unwarranted legitimacy,” Marcel Emmerich, a lawmaker for the Greens, told the German Press Agency.
“This is a slap in the face for all those who have fought for democracy against the Taliban for years,” he added.
Similarly, Die Linke MP Clara Bünger argued: “Anyone who negotiates with the Taliban legitimises and trivialises terrorists.” Dobrindt is planning “large-scale deportations to a country where torture, public executions and floggings are commonplace,” she said, and was making himself complicit in such abuses.
On the right, the AfD has long urged Germany to open a “contact office” in Kabul and has criticised the government’s approach as timid. Given the large number of Afghan migrants in Germany, only deporting a handful of criminals is “a drop in the ocean,” claimed AfD MP Gottfried Curio.
Meanwhile, an editorial in the Süddeutsche Zeitung lamented Germany’s “exasperating” Afghanistan policies. While Berlin could be addressing the fact that girls remain barred from schools or that the Taliban has reneged on its promise to share power, the Chancellery appears focused solely on deportations, the liberal newspaper stated.
What comes next?
The federal government views the deportation of convicted criminals as merely the first step towards a broader effort to repatriate Afghan nationals whose asylum applications have been rejected.
The coalition agreement, signed by the CDU and SPD, states: “We will deport people to Afghanistan and Syria, starting with criminals and dangerous individuals.”
The word “starting” is key. Dobrindt has made clear that, by working with the Taliban, he hopes to establish a mechanism for a comprehensive deportation framework. If media reports are correct, Berlin is only weeks away from announcing that it has concluded such a deal.
It remains unclear how many people could ultimately be affected. Of the 30,000 Afghans who applied for asylum this year, roughly half have been rejected.
The Taliban have reportedly sought nothing in return for taking back deportees during talks with their German counterparts but are instead eager to demonstrate reliability as they attempt to emerge from international isolation.
However, on Wednesday broadcaster ARD reported that the Taliban now wants to fly its own flag from its embassy in Berlin rather than the black red and green flag that represented the country during the years of NATO occupation.
Next on Dobrindt’s list is Syria. With the Levantine country’s civil war now over, the Interior Minister aims to strike an agreement with the new leader in Damascus, Ahmed al-Sharaa, by year’s end. The plan is to begin by deporting criminals and then to expand the scheme to include those “living off social welfare.”
How many Syrians might be affected is hard to gauge. While hundreds of thousands reside in Germany, most are employed and thus unlikely to fall under the policy’s scope.
The German Review’s take:
Those seeking to scandalise Germany’s engagement with the Taliban show a curious lack of humility regarding the West’s ability to shape Afghan politics. After a quarter-century of failed state-building on the Hindu Kush, the idea that Berlin retains meaningful leverage over the Taliban’s domestic agenda is almost comically delusional.
Frankly, whether Germany deports a few thousand rejected asylum seekers or not will have no bearing on whether the Taliban lifts its ban on girls’ education. Cooperating where interests align is simply an acknowledgement of geopolitical reality.
As for Syria, the time has also come to engage pragmatically with a regime that, while unlikely to evolve into a democracy, has largely ended the bloodshed. Germany offered refuge while bombs were falling; now that the violence has stopped, the grounds for asylum have diminished.
The crucial question is not if Germany should deport, but whom it should deport.
Sending back hardened criminals—many serving life sentences—is, in my view, an insult to their victims. Far from fears that the Taliban might execute them, it seems more likely they will walk free after they land back in Kabul. Murderers, rapists and the like should complete their full sentences in Germany before being sent home. But, politicians are rounding them up from prisons to try to generate some good headlines in the Bild Zeitung.
At the same time, it would be an act of needless self-harm to deport the any one who has a steady job - which in the case of Syrians at least is the large majority.
Instead, deportations to should target those monitored by intelligence agencies as potential extremists, petty criminals and individuals who, despite years in Germany, have failed to secure stable employment.
Last week’s poll result: Germany’s recent steps to legalise cannabis...
went too far — 15%
didn’t go far enough — 77%
got the balance just right — 8%
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Sincerely,
Jörg Luyken