Last week, German defense minister Franz-Josef Jung announced that Berlin plans to send 1,000 more troops to Afghanistan this fall to support the NATO-led military effort there. This deployment will bring the number of Bundeswehr ISAF soldiers to 4,500, bolstering Germany’s position as the third-largest troop contributor to the Afghanistan mission after the United States and the UK. At the same time, defense minister Jung also said that Germany would cut the maximum number of troops deployed under the separate OEF mandate–which allows Bundeswehr soldiers and several German navy vessels to participate in U.S.-led anti-terror operations in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, etc.–from 1,400 to 800 this fall. Unlike ISAF, the OEF mission is not specifically covered by a UN Security Council resolution. Furthermore, on July 1, Germany is taking over the NATO Quick Reaction Force from Norway. This is a potentially dangerous, “highly kinetic” rapid-response mission designed to protect ISAF troops against Taliban ambushes. As required by the German constitution, the strengthened ISAF mandate must be approved by parliament in October. The new mandate will have a 14-month term–rather than the usual one-year duration–in a calculated move to keep the Bundeswehr’s politically controversial Afghanistan mission out of Germany’s next hotly contested general election on September 27, 2009. Last week, the German Bundestag’s budget committee also approved about $750 million in additional military procurement, including 98 state-of-the-art armored “Dingo 2” vehicles that are used by Bundeswehr troops in Afghanistan. For Chancellor Merkel and her conservative CDU/CSU allies, the beefed-up Afghanistan deployment carries significant political risks. After all, more than two-thirds of the German population are in favor of a swift Bundeswehr withdrawal from Afghanistan. So far, Angela Merkel’s left-wing SPD “grand coalition” partner remains largely supportive of her Afghanistan policy; the same goes for the Greens–even though both parties would prefer to put more emphasis on the reconstruction component rather than the anti-terrorist component of the NATO deployment. For the SPD and the Greens, of course, a sudden populist volte-face is not easy to pull off politically; after all, it was the previous left-wing Red-Green coalition government under Chancellor Schroeder that first decided to deploy German Bundeswehr troops to Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. So far, only the populist Left Party is running on a clear “Out of Afghanistan Now!” platform. For them, this issue provides a golden opportunity to attract far-left SPD supporters as well as pacifist voters from other parties to their ranks. And indeed, the Left Party is surging in national opinion polls (now standing at 15 percent) while the SPD is hovering around an all-time low of about 22 percent.
