After five days, opposition MP Bijan Djir-Sarai has had enough of the carousel of blame.

The foreign policy spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group politely asked in a statement on Friday that the failure in Afghanistan should not be “blamed” on the Federal Intelligence Service alone;

where "the entire federal government" is responsible for it.

In the last few days, all sides had contributed to the accusation game in the grand coalition: The SPD accused the CSU-led Federal Ministry of the Interior that for a long time the group of Afghan local staff had been reluctant to expand there.

Johannes Leithäuser

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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The CSU, in turn, shot sharp arrows from Munich at Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, who belonged to the SPD, who for his part recognized joint liability with the sentence "We all misjudged the situation", but who on the other hand noted an individual misjudgment of the situation by the German foreign intelligence service .

The President of the BND (the service is directly under the responsibility of the Chancellery), however, had frankly admitted in his questioning in the Defense Committee of the Bundestag last Wednesday that his authority had not foreseen the rapid collapse of military and state authority in Kabul during the past weekend .

The Federal Foreign Office reacted too late

Most of the frustrated accusations generated by the shock of this collapse, meanwhile, hit the foreign minister. They relate primarily to two issues: On the one hand, it is said that the Foreign Office and the minister have done too little to protect the locals since April, i.e. since the American government announced that it would end the Western military presence in Afghanistan by the beginning of July to bring Afghan employees of the German authorities, agencies and aid organizations out of the country or to prepare their departure. On the other hand, the accusation is aimed at Maas, that he ordered the evacuation of the German embassy only at the last moment and that he apparently misunderstood the seriousness of the situation for a long time.

The fact that the Afghans who worked for civilian German agencies, unlike those who were employed by the Bundeswehr, were not put on lists in the spring and asked to prove that they were threatened was less a neglect than a conscious political decision. Not only Germany, all western partner nations wanted to avoid the impression that with the withdrawal of the troops the West would give Afghanistan a complete loss. On the contrary, the civil aid workers should stay in order to demonstrate confidence in the political and military stability of the Afghan state. Maas also openly represented this position in the Bundestag, where he explained on June 9th that it had refrained from organizing charter flights for local staff to leave because it would "be a difficult picture" if the impression were made thatthat Afghans are fleeing the country “by airplane”. Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer drew the same picture two weeks later when she said that "pictures of large-scale evacuation measures" should be avoided.

The Americans offered their help early on

Only two months later, two days before the fall of Kabul, did the Foreign Office change its position;

At the time, Maas announced on breakfast television that “one or two charter flights” were being organized, which, however, could no longer be used.

The decision to evacuate the German embassy only last weekend, contrary to internal warnings, followed a similar argument: An earlier abandonment of the embassy operations would have acted like a vote of no confidence and the fragile Afghan state power would have crumbled further. Maas pointed out several times in the past few days that the German decisions on evacuation and departure from the embassy were made in line with the measures taken by other western countries, which also formed the neighborhood in the specially secured green zone in Kabul's government district. Obviously, however, the Americans were setting the pace, and their pace apparently accelerated several times in the dramatic hours of the past weekend.

According to reports, the fundamental decision to close the embassy was made on Friday, at the beginning of last weekend. Then a prescribed program followed: confidential documents had to be destroyed, official seals destroyed, weapons that could not be taken away with them had to be rendered unusable. The Americans, who had offered the German diplomats transport assistance by air to the airport at an early stage, meanwhile increased their withdrawal speed, so that the Germans got into the helicopters rather late on Sunday.

One and a half years ago, the German Foreign Minister led the largest repatriation campaign in the history of the Federal Republic - the repatriation of German vacationers at the beginning of the corona pandemic. Today he has to share responsibility for the most dangerous airlift and this time also take responsibility for its causes. It will be some time before the success of this action can be judged.