With Germany’s G8 Summit and rotating EU presidency over, the controversial Bundeswehr mission in Afghanistan has returned to the top of the political agenda in Berlin. On Tuesday this week, Germany’s highest court rejected a suit filed by the populist, post-Communist Left party, which claimed that the recent deployment of six Tornado reconnaissance aircraft to Southern Afghanistan to support the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had gone beyond NATO’s initial raison d’être as a collective defensive organization and was therefore a violation of the German constitution.
The German Tornado aircraft will carry cameras
but no bombs or missiles.
As the eight judges from the Constitutional Court’s Second Senate put it, “the NATO-led ISAF mission in Afghanistan serves the security of the Euro-Atlantic area” and is therefore covered by the North Atlantic Treaty that then-West Germany ratified in 1955. In particular, the Court clearly rejected the plaintiffs’ absurd argument that defensive NATO military operations should be strictly limited to the territory of NATO members only. According to the Left party’s twisted logic, NATO should apparently adopt an approach of “let’s fight them here so we don’t have to fight them there.” Other Left party politicians, including, possibly, some far-left members from the governing SPD party, seem to think that if they pull troops out of Afghanistan, terrorists will simply leave Germany alone. While the Constitutional Court’s ruling in support of the Tornado deployment was widely expected in Berlin’s political circles, it is worth emphasizing that the eight judges established a direct causal link between security conditions on the ground in Afghanistan and the continuing terror threat to the “security of the Euro-Atlantic area”. At the same time, however, one should not forget that more than 60 percent of the German public no longer supports the Bundeswehr’s Afghanistan engagement. Similar public opinion challenges are faced by virtually all other NATO member governments that have troops deployed there, ranging from Canada to Italy and the Netherlands. Unfortunately, recent casualties among Afghan civilians in connection with offensive NATO operations have added to the growing Western choir demanding an exit strategy from Afghanistan, including even a precipitous troop withdrawal. While NATO forces must make every effort to avoid civilian Afghan casualties–this is not only a moral but also a political-military imperative of any counterinsurgency operations aimed at separating the terrorists from their local support base–one should not forget what Afghanistan looked like before the US-led NATO intervention, that pre-9/11 Afghanistan proved to be a serious threat to NATO member countries. If NATO withdraws from Afghanistan now, leaving a resurgent Taliban and a weak central government, there’s little reason to hope for a different result the second time around.
