Dear Reader,

On Tuesday evening the last German soldiers left Afghanistan, bringing to an end almost twenty years of military presence on the Hindukush. Some 150,000 Bundeswehr soldiers served in Afghanistan during that time. Fifty nine never made it home.

But the “historic” end to the military deployment didn’t even make it onto the evening news. Die Nationalmannschaft’s defeat to England on the same evening shunted it off the agenda.

The exit of the last soldiers, which happened in the dead of the night, was brought forward by a few weeks. Amid reports that the Taliban were closing in on the German base at Masar-i-Scharif, the Defence Ministry’s priority seems to have been to get its soldiers out while the appearance of stability still stood.

“The fact that German troops are leaving in a hush-hush operation, rather than in front of cameras or with a small victory parade, already indicates that the Bundeswehr mission has n…