A strongly-worded letter by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates requesting the deployment of German combat troops and helicopters to southern Afghanistan has caused a major political backlash in Berlin. Both the content and timing of Gates’s blunt letter to his German counterpart Franz-Josef Jung, which was leaked yesterday by the center-left paper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, have left even staunchly pro-American politicians from the conservative CDU/CSU parties supporting Chancellor Merkel astounded and annoyed. The German response was swift. Speaking at a hastily arranged press conference in Berlin earlier today, CDU defense minister Jung offered this terse statement:
Even Chancellor Merkel’s usually soft-spoken spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm weighed in on the discussion, emphasizing that his boss had already made it very clear on a number of occasions that a change in the Bundeswehr’s current Afghanistan mandate (which needs yearly parliamentary approval) “is not a topic for discussion.” The Pentagon’s aggressive attempt to get this key ally to cough up more troops for Afghanistan (right now, Berlin has 3,500 soldiers there, the third-blargest NATO contingent overall) comes at the very time that the German government is considering a new NATO request to deploy about 250 additional Bundeswehr troops as part of the Alliance’s Quick Response Force (QRF) in northern Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the Gates letter had the effect of putting those CDU/CSU politicians on the political defensive when they were already arguing in favor of Germany taking over the dangerous QRF mission in the North. For example, even someone like Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg–a prominent CSU Bundestag member who sits on the foreign relations and defense committees and travels to Washington frequently–felt compelled today to issue a press release calling the tone of Gates’s letter “inappropriate” and urging the Pentagon and the rest of the U.S. administration to “straighten its lines of communication.”
Several conservative foreign policy experts in Berlin seem to believe that it was the U.S. Embassy that dropped the ball in terms of underestimating the political repercussions of the Gates letter, especially against the backdrop of the on-going debate about Germany’s potential QRF engagement. For sure, one can argue that this was a confidential letter by Gates to his German counterpart–that it should never have become front-page news in the first place. At the same time, though, leaks happen, especially when they touch on such high-profile issues. Current opinion polls indicate that about two-thirds of all Germans want an immediate Bundeswehr pullout from Afghanistan, but despite this growing public pressure, Chancellor Merkel and her CDU/CSU allies are strongly committed to the Bundeswehr’s Afghanistan mission and considering doing more (like in the case of QRF). Given this highly charged domestic political context, aggressive demands from abroad that Germany deploy additional combat troops and helicopters to southern Afghanistan tend to play into the hands of those who want a complete German military pullout. But it’s a catch-22. Europe’s failure to provide adequate resources to the fight has badly hobbled the war effort, and any American demands to increase that support plays right into the hands of the left-wing ideologues who are pushing for a total withdrawal.
