TODAY THE GERMAN parliament is scheduled to vote on whether to extend the Bundeswehr’s 3,000-strong ISAF military deployment in Afghanistan for another year. While there is no doubt that Chancellor Merkel’s Grand Coalition has enough votes to get the measure passed, the much-anticipated Bundestag debate will certainly highlight growing opposition to what is increasingly viewed by the German public as a lost-cause mission with close to zero moral legitimacy. Public opinion in Germany, like in Canada, has already turned firmly against the ISAF/OEF missions in Afghanistan, with recent surveys indicating that two-thirds of all Germans favor an immediate military withdrawal. For Chancellor Merkel and her conservative CDU/CSU allies, the Bundeswehr’s bloody, seemingly open-ended Afghan engagement is a political time bomb that could easily blow up in the run-up to the next federal elections to be held by fall of 2009. In fact, Afghanistan is arguably Merkel’s only foreign policy weak spot and, at the same time, her biggest potential domestic political liability.
So far, only the post-Communist Left party is officially calling for a pullout. However, many left-wing MPs from the governing SPD party and even a growing number of CDU/CSU MPs, under strong pressure from their local constituents, are more or less openly opposed to the Afghanistan mission. The Greens are divided, with some MPs indicating that they will vote for the ISAF extension, thus ignoring a recent, non-binding party congress resolution demanding exactly the contrary.
The Left party is playing the pacifist card very effectively, rising in the polls and draining crucial voters from the SPD ahead of key regional elections in several German states next spring. To counter this dangerous trend, SPD leaders could ultimately be tempted to demand a pull-out, or a massive draw-down, of German troops in Afghanistan, both to re-gain voters on the left and to seize a very emotional, concrete theme on which to attack the Chancellor and the CDU/CSU parties during the next election campaigns.
Given this highly charged domestic political context, aggressive demands from abroad that German troops leave the “safe” parts of northern Afghanistan to support terrorist-hunting operations in the South are not only misplaced but also play into the hands of those who want a complete German military pullout. First of all, the north is not a safe area. Suicide attacks on German forces there have increased sharply in recent weeks and months, bringing the total body count to 21. Second, if Germany’s continued military presence in Afghanistan were to be seen as the result of trying to conform to American pressures, the public diplomacy case for sustaining the German mission there would certainly be lost at the hands of left-wing demagogues waiting to play the potent card of latent anti-Americanism. Right now, there’s already a widespread perception in Germany that the Bundeswehr’s Afghan deployment is, above all, part of President Bush’s “global war on terror,” aka the neocon crusade.
Finally, any move by this key NATO ally to significantly reduce or withdraw its Afghan deployment could cause a dangerous chain reaction across the Alliance as other countries face serious pressure to do the same. German politicians and public opinion are already following the Afghanistan debates in Canada, the Netherlands, etc. quite closely–and vice versa. After all, no one wants to be the last NATO member to sacrifice troops for a lost military cause when others are already beginning to retreat.
So how can the Afghanistan conundrum be solved? In essence, there are two options. The first one–politically tempting but strategically dangerous–would be for the governments concerned to cave in to public pressures and to pull out of Afghanistan. In the short term, such a move, supported by large segments of public opinion in Germany, Canada, and elsewhere would defuse a situation that risks causing electoral defeat at the hands of disgruntled voters who no longer buy into the moral legitimacy and military necessity of the Afghanistan intervention the way they did in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The huge risk of abandoning Afghanistan is of course to allow it once again to become a failed-state paradise for international terrorists and drug lords, with potentially devastating consequences for Western security interests around the world.
The second option is to go on the offensive and try to convince public opinion at home that the military mission in Afghanistan is a cause worth fighting for. Germany, for instance, just narrowly escaped disaster a few weeks ago when a group of Islamic terrorists (including two German converts), who were trained at al Qaeda camps along the Afghan-Pakistani border, were arrested before they could set off massive car bombs at Frankfurt airport on September 11. But making the case for the Afghanistan mission directly is a risky strategy that demands brutal honesty and strong political leadership. The brutal truth is that we are unlikely to successfully transform Afghanistan into a thriving Western-style democracy. Rather, the realistic litmus test should be to make sure that the country can never again serve as a safe haven for international Islamic terrorists.
Finally, and most importantly, political leaders from the relevant NATO countries involved can no longer afford to avoid engaging in a fundamental public discussion of why fighting in Afghanistan–and losing soldiers there–is justified in terms of our core national security interests. So far, Chancellor Merkel has successfully managed to stay out of Germany’s acrimonious Afghanistan debate, opting instead to bask in her many remarkable foreign policy accomplishments. But with al Qaeda and the Taliban on the rise in Afghanistan, and increasing domestic opposition to the Bundeswehr deployment there, a defensive, reactive, see-no-evil-speak-no-evil strategy ultimately carries huge potential political and military risks, both at home and abroad.
Ulf Gartzke is a regular contributor to THE WORLDWIDE STANDARD.
