Maas circles Afghanistan: Driven by feelings of guilt

Foreign Minister Heiko Maas spent four days around the seething Afghanistan to save those who could still be saved.

At the stops of his hectic journey in Antalya, Tashkent, Dushanbe and Islamabad, the aim was to find a way out for tens of thousands, whom Maas had promised rescue from the Taliban on behalf of Germany.

The first attempt to keep this promise failed.

The Bundeswehr has flown more than five thousand people from Kabul. However, according to current censuses, there were only 138 former local workers and their family members among the 4,000 Afghans, a total of around 650 people. How exactly the others got into the machines is currently just as unclear as the question of why so many desperate people had to stay behind.

Driven by feelings of guilt, the Federal Foreign Office has meanwhile continued to add to the rescue lists.

There are now more than 50,000 people, with new ones being added every day for whom a guarantee of admission applies.

This is a morally justified multiplication of the initial estimates.

Maas and German diplomacy are working to enable these vulnerable people to leave the country.

Deep bows were now necessary for this, also to a terrorist organization and regime of evil sort in Afghanistan's neighborhood.

The "dear Heiko" and the "dear Mevlüt"

To open an airway, Turkey has offered to operate the civil airport in Kabul. This brings it closer to European diplomacy and NATO. The German Foreign Minister, “Dear Heiko”, and his Turkish colleague, “Dear Mevlüt”, praised each other during a first stop on the Maas trip. Then, in Uzbekistan, the foreign minister had to deal with a government to which Germany owed a lot in recent weeks, including the use of the Tashkent airport by the German armed forces.

In the Economist's Democracy Index, Uzbekistan ranks 155th out of 167. After all, two places ahead of Tajikistan. In the local capital Dushanbe, Maas found his role as supplicant particularly difficult, because there is a totalitarian regime. Maas had to ask a potentate to open the border, who forced his subjects by law to address him as the "leader of the nation".

In Pakistan, where Maas first of all paid his respects to the Army Chief of Staff, the German chief diplomat had to listen to his colleague's instructions.

The fact that Islamabad had supported factions of the Taliban movement for years and, in its ambivalence, contributed to the destabilization of Afghanistan, does not add to that.

Pakistan's Foreign Minister said that the progress reports that the West had provided over the years were false.

On this point, the Federal Foreign Office could and should even agree.

But you can only hear such things, if at all, from retired diplomats.

Finished reports on the seriousness of the situation 

Martin Kobler, for example, was a long time in Afghanistan and in 2017 the German ambassador to Pakistan.

He admitted that the envoys or officers in Kabul or Kunduz had correctly described the gravity of the situation.

But the reports on the higher floors were then "embellished over many, many years".

Germany also did not prevent corruption and bad governance in Afghanistan, but promoted it.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars" had the rulers "brought out of the country and invested in real estate in London or Dubai or wherever".

Several German foreign ministers knew this.

Finally, Heiko Maas, who was often enough in Kabul.

At the same time he gave himself up for surreal "Afghan schoolgirls make art" scenes, which were staged in the middle of the fortified concrete landscapes of the German camp.

The bill for illusions, looking the other way and loss of reality has to be paid mainly by those who fought for democracy and progress in Afghanistan. Many local Afghan workers were also part of it. It is the bare minimum now to protect them from repression and persecution. When the election campaign is over and the Bundestag is constituted, Germany will have to answer for this failure. This also includes the question of why the transatlantic principle “In together, out together” was halved by Washington and what follows from it.

It is therefore urgent to reassess the long-slipped foreign mission in Mali. There, too, the Bundeswehr is less based on national interests than at the request of a close ally, in this case France. The mission has been going on for eight years and the situation is not improving. On the contrary: Corruption flourishes, there is coup and killing. Twelve German soldiers were injured in a suicide attack at the end of June. A first lesson from Afghanistan must be to examine this mission. This time without hot reports.