Did the German army achieve anything in Afghanistan?
The Bundeswehr in Afghanistan
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 main evening news show. 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 not improved Afghanistan's security,” commented Afghanistan expert Thomas Ruttig on his blog.
The speed of the retreat also means that Afghans who worked with the Bundeswehr, and who have been offered sanctuary in Germany, will have to arrange for their own exit.
Even the German government isn’t glossing over the two-decade deployment’s lack of concrete achievements.
Speaking to the Bundestag last week, Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said “we must critically question whether the goals we set ourselves - I mean ‘nation building’ - can really be maintained in the long run.”
Kramp-Karrenbauer praised the fact that women could now go to school and university, but conceded that “whether that can be sustained in the long term will be decided over the next few months.”
Don’t mention the war
One of the striking aspects of the Bundeswehr’s involvement in the ISAF mission in Afghanistan is that the German government refused to use the word ‘war’ for the first eight years.
Berlin wanted to emphasize that the main work of the Bundeswehr mission was not fighting but ‘nation building.’
Based in the relatively peaceful north, German soldiers were supposed to act as security, muscle and facilitators as western money poured into projects to build schools for girls, provide clean water to villages, and modernize pot-holed roads.
But, as the security situation crumbled from 2006 onwards, German soldiers were drawn into ever more gun fights with the Taliban. For soldiers who wanted to take more assertive action, the government’s refusal to accept that they were involved in a war seemed delusional.
And it wasn’t just semantics.
The government’s attitude “led to German troops being scandalously ill-equipped when the Taliban got serious,” Süddeutsche Zeitung journalist Joachim Käppner wrote this week. “There was a lack of safe vehicles, helicopters and much more. The price paid by the soldiers was high.”
The refusal to mention the word war also seems to have led to a denialism about losses of civilian life.
This was best illustrated by the decision to call in an air strike on two petrol tankers which had been seized by the Taliban near a German base in Kunduz in August 2009.
Bundeswehr commander Georg Klein feared that the insurgents would ram the tankers into the German base. But the airstrike caused 142 deaths: most of the victims were villagers who had crowded around the tankers after hearing that the Taliban were giving away free petrol.
Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung was forced to resign after failing to acknowledge that civilians had been killed.
According to journalist Marc Thörner, whose fascinating six-part radio documentary for Deustchlandfunk tells the story of the German mission, the airstrike in Kunduz was a turning point. Villagers he spoke to said that it made them conclude that the Taliban were the better rulers.
First military offensive since WWII
In 2010, after three soldiers died in a single day of fighting, the German government finally started talking about war. New defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Gutterberg admitted that “when talking casually one could use the word war.”
With Taliban influence in the north growing - and with the US following a new strategy of clear, hold and build - the Bundeswehr also went on the offensive. Operation Halmazag was the first German military offensive since the Second World War. It’s aim was to root out Taliban fighters, rebuild local infrastructure with the consent of local elders and thus sustainably ‘hold’ the territory.
Within five days at the start of November 2010 they had managed to recapture a district to the southwest of the city of Kunduz without sustaining any losses.
Unknown to the German public though, the Bundeswehr had been working with local militias, some of whom were led by bandits. After German soldiers had cleared the area of insurgents, these militias took over - and quickly went about stealing from the local population, according to Thörner.
Later research by broadcaster WDR also showed that the operation most probably led to significant numbers of civilian casualties. Moreover, by 2015 the Taliban had quietly retaken much of the land that the Bundeswehr had driven them out of.
2010 also seems to have marked a turning point where Germany gave up on the ideals of working with civil society and instead followed a strategy of relying on the influence of clan chiefs.
This often meant turning a blind eye to practises that didn’t exactly line up with the ideals of democratization and human rights.
According to Thörner, the governor in the German-run province of Kunduz had an enormous poppy plantation. Soldiers were told to ignore it - in the name of stability. Meanwhile local journalists who were critical of official corruption found themselves being accused of blasphemy and had to flee the country.
By 2013 the last German infantry battalion left the country to be replaced by ‘military advisors’ whose job it was to make the local security forces capable of holding back Taliban attacks.
The mission was now clear: create enough stability so that western forces could get out while saving face.
Lessons learned
By 2018 the German mission in Afghanistan had cost some €16 billion. Of that total, €11 billion went on the military operation while the rest was spent on infrastructure projects, police training, humanitarian help, and election support projects.
The general consensus is that - the next time Germany goes to war - it needs to be honest with both soldiers and the general public about why they are there.
Kramp-Karrenbauer said in her Bundestag speech that the “possibly exaggerated political ambitions and goals” of Afghanistan should not be repeated elsewhere - a statement that seems to imply that the Bundeswehr won’t be doing any national building any time soon.
For Joachim Käppner of the Süddeutsche Zeitung this is exactly the wrong lesson. “The first mistake after the toppling of the Taliban was that not enough energy was put into sustainable nation building,” he argues.
Käppner says that the Bundeswehr “achieved admirable things” with its infrastructure and education projects. “But will it last? Answers are lacking - even to the most pressing question for the soldiers: ‘Was it all worth it?’”