At the last meeting of the Defense Minister with the commanders of the Bundeswehr before the federal election, Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer announced that the Bundeswehr would begin to take stock of its deployment in Afghanistan in the next few weeks.
The minister anticipated that the soldiers had “fulfilled all the tasks that parliament gave them” in the almost two decades of deployment.
For twenty years it had been possible to ensure that the Islamist terror network Al Qaeda could no longer find a safe haven in Afghanistan.
Johannes Leithäuser
Political correspondent in Berlin.
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Kramp-Karrenbauer said restrictively that “nation-building has certainly been less successful”. The lessons that followed should also be applied in the other areas of operation of the Bundeswehr. With regard to Mali and other countries in the Sahel zone, the federal government must now “think more carefully” about which military and political goals can realistically be achieved there ”.
Regarding the situation in Mali, Kramp-Karrenbauer said, “We can only stay there if democratic conditions are foreseeable again”. The Bundeswehr and soldiers from European countries should not run the risk of being abused "as a fig leaf by putschists". The minister responded to France's announcement that it would gradually end its anti-terrorist mission in the Sahel by announcing that there would be consultations with France over the next week on "how we should react to the changed situation".
Kramp-Karrenbauer defended her latest reform initiative, which is supposed to bring more combat power and faster operational capabilities to the Bundeswehr, against the criticism that the ideas were presented too late in the electoral term. She said that the threat situation, the operational situation and the financial situation of the Bundeswehr required rapid changes: "The reconstruction of the Bundeswehr has no election periods, it only knows necessities". If a new commission had not been commissioned with new studies until after the election, then another three years would have passed before new proposals had been submitted, said the minister. The Bundeswehr needs a structure that is better suited to future threats than it is today; the preparatory work has now been done.
In the opinion of the Minister, in order to reliably finance the Bundeswehr, it is necessary not to finance innovative and prestigious armaments projects such as the next-generation Franco-German fighter aircraft from the Bundeswehr budget alone. The sums of such projects are “not to be borne by the Ministry of Defense alone, the entire federal government is responsible here. She announced that “the fight to increase the budget” for the Bundeswehr was not over yet. The next coalition agreement must also include the commitment to sustainably strengthen the Bundeswehr's financial position. Kramp-Karrenbauer said there would be efforts to increase medium-term financial planning for the Bundeswehr before the end of the current election period.