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Bundeswehr soldier in Afghanistan, March 2013
Photo: Maurizio Gambarini/dpa
According to SPIEGEL information, the Bundestag study commission harshly criticized the coordination of the almost 20-year Afghanistan mission by the incumbent federal governments.
With the withdrawal of NATO forces and the Taliban coming to power in August 2021, Germany and its international partners "strategically failed to secure results and set goals in the long term," says the approximately 350-page interim report, which is to be officially presented next week .
The commission, headed by the SPD foreign politician Michael Müller, accuses the responsible politicians in the ministries, military and diplomats of a lack of sense of reality, poor coordination and years of sugarcoating the situation.
“An ongoing, self-critical inventory of the very ambitious goals, their feasibility and the necessary use of resources has not taken place sufficiently,” writes the twelve-member committee.
The coordination between the responsible ministries, especially the Foreign Office, the Defense Ministry and the Development Ministry, was characterized by “departmental egoism” instead of cooperation. Instructions for deployment were given “in parallel in the respective departments and were not coordinated with one another.” And further: “The definition of a cross-departmental political-strategic overall goal was missing,” says the paper. The ideas about what could be achieved in the Hindu Kush were “exaggerated and overloaded”.
In addition, situation reports were not combined to form a realistic overall picture, and the Bundeswehr's equipment and capabilities often did not correspond to the threat situation.
Later, the federal ministries presented the situation “often too positively in the style of progress reports,” which “prevented timely learning from undesirable developments.”
Also explosive is the criticism that Berlin has “not dealt enough with the Taliban as part of society and a central actor in the conflict.” Berlin “underestimated their increasing influence and did not take their chances of success seriously.”
Instead, the radical Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda was fought as a military enemy. This prevented "considerations about their integration into the political process" and even enabled the Taliban to present themselves as "legitimate opposition to a corrupt government determined from abroad."
The Commission should present lessons from the military and civilian engagement in Afghanistan for future foreign and security policy no later than after the parliamentary summer break this year.
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