The defense minister flew to Tashkent on Thursday and received the Bundeswehr forces who had been involved in Germany's largest military evacuation mission to date.

Federal police officers also stayed in Afghanistan until the end of the dangerous mission.

They had supported the security of the embassy staff and supported the departure of local staff and people at risk.

But the Federal Minister of the Interior was not at Berlin's BER airport, where the nine police officers landed shortly after 9 a.m. on Friday morning.

Helene Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Horst Seehofer is in Bavaria and decided to stay there.

State Secretary Hans-Georg Engelke and Federal Police President Dieter Romann stood at the airport.

Seehofer's thanks came in a press release: The police officers “at the risk of their lives did a dangerous and very important service for our country to protect and save others”, it says there.

"That is extremely honorable and deserves great respect."

In the heated exchange of blows over the question of who is responsible for the late rescue of the local staff, Seehofer's name comes up again and again.

The Foreign Office points to the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of the Interior points back, the opposition is attacking Seehofer - it is election campaign time, no matter how many people are in mortal danger.

The main reason why no one is loudly calling for the Federal Minister of the Interior to resign is due to the fact that Seehofer wants to withdraw from politics with the end of this government.

Seehofer rejects the criticism

Seehofer has expressed concern about the situation in Afghanistan several times, but apparently he does not see any mistakes of his own. In the press conference following last week's Interior Committee meeting, he denied criticism that excessive bureaucracy had delayed the rescue of Afghan local workers. No proceedings failed at his ministry. Incidentally, his house is not responsible for issuing visas.

In fact, this task falls within the portfolio of the Federal Foreign Office.

And yet Seehofer made it too easy for himself.

The Federal Ministry of the Interior was in charge of local staff proceedings from the start.

Since 2013, Afghans who have worked for the Federal Police, the German Armed Forces or development aid organizations have had the opportunity to obtain a right of residence in Germany.

The prerequisite is that the local employee has worked for a German department and is therefore at risk in their own country.

At the end of July, around 4,800 Afghans and their families came to Germany in this way.

Complicated visa procedures

From the point of view of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, it was particularly important that the local staff apply for a visa before entering the country. This is because the identity is established in this process, and an automated security check also takes place. Issuing visas in Afghanistan has been complicated since 2017 because the visa office there remained closed after the attack on the German embassy in Kabul. Seehofer knew about this problem.

The Conference of Interior Ministers had already decided in June that the federal government should examine whether the process could be streamlined and accelerated by issuing visas not in Afghanistan but on arrival in Germany. However, there was not much sympathy among the interior ministers for the so-called “visas on arrival”. You are responsible for security and have a problem with the idea that people come to Germany without a prior security check. And so nothing happened at first. The Federal Ministry of the Interior only wanted to change the procedure when it was no longer possible to issue a visa in Afghanistan. This only happened on Friday, August 13, shortly before the weekend when Kabul fell to the Taliban. For many local staff that was too late.

Two days earlier, Seehofer had insisted on deportations to Afghanistan - here too, looking back, his behavior looked very unhappy.

On Wednesday, August 11, the spokesman for the Federal Ministry of the Interior assured the government press conference that the house was sticking to the plan to deport six detainees to Afghanistan.

Then the correction took place.

A press release was sent out that same afternoon that the deportations would be suspended for the time being.

Was there another reason for the hesitation?

Didn't Seehofer see how much the situation had come to a head in the meantime? It is plausible that the long hesitation has another reason: Seehofer probably wanted to prevent a debate about migration policy five weeks before the election. The fear that the AfD would get a boost again if local workers came here without a prior security check and deportations were suspended was great throughout the Union - and it paralyzed decision-making.

In view of this, however, it is all the more puzzling that Seehofer spoke of 300,000 to five million Afghan refugees in the Interior Committee. In intelligence circles and among migration experts, the order of magnitude of five million is not considered to be backed up by facts. Seehofer felt misunderstood that he wanted to suggest with the range that forecasts are currently not possible. But a politician who has been in business for fifty years knows that this is not how it works.