Bundestag on Afghanistan: A lot to talk about

The rescue mission of the Bundeswehr in Kabul is to be subsequently confirmed by the Bundestag today. An unusual procedure. The federal government is under pressure. A lot went wrong in Afghanistan.

The Bundeswehr is currently flying out Germans, local staff and their families from Afghanistan under the most difficult conditions. However, the use must be legitimized retrospectively by parliament. Since it is a matter of life and death in Kabul, the federal government could not wait last week for the members of the Bundestag to meet. So she made the decision for the rescue mission in the cabinet last Wednesday and is now relying on confirmation from the Bundestag. That should happen today. Before that, Chancellor Angela Merkel will make a government statement.

The unusual procedure shows how much the federal government has come under pressure. It must have been clear to Merkel and her ministers for a long time that the Taliban would sooner or later seize power in Afghanistan. Apparently none of them had expected that it would happen so quickly, least of all that the Afghan government army would give up practically without a fight. Perhaps in the summer they still hoped that the issue of Afghanistan could be kept out of the election campaign.

It is not just the opposition that speaks of failure

At the center of criticism: Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, Development Aid Minister Gerd Müller, but also the Chancellery and the Federal Intelligence Service (BND). Not only the opposition speaks of “failure”, members of the government parliamentary groups also use paraphrases such as “political catastrophe”, such as the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Norbert Röttgen.

As if the situation weren’t dramatic enough, some ministries blamed each other for the reappraisal. Motto: attack is the best defense.

Embassy in Kabul had warned

The bottom line was that the federal government lacked a worst-case scenario: What would Germany do if the Taliban took power before September, i.e. before the embassy staff, interpreters, drivers, cleaning staff, security personnel, political advisors or NGO members Afghanistan could be pulled out?

The employees of the embassy in Kabul had already sounded the alarm before the dramatic events around August 14th and 15th and warned of the rapid advance of the Taliban. Perhaps they were the ones who best anticipated the dramatic situation in Kabul. No wonder, they also had to endure pressure after the British, Japanese and Canadians announced that they would be withdrawing their personnel from Kabul. But why didn’t the Federal Foreign Office and the entire federal government listen to them?

Maas allegations against the BND

Foreign Minister Maas was initially self-critical when he said that the German government had “misjudged the situation”. At the end of last week he made the Federal Intelligence Service at least jointly responsible in the “Spiegel” interview. The BND also made a wrong assessment of the situation.

During the questioning in the parliamentary control committee a few days earlier, BND boss Bruno Kahl had apparently been able to demonstrate that his intelligence service had “delivered”, as at least the PKGr members of the Union and the Greens said after the meeting. On Friday, August 13, the BND assumed that Kabul would not fall to the Taliban before September. However, on the premise that the Americans would stay in the so-called Green Zone of Kabul.

Nobody in the federal government thought it possible that the USA would not inform the Germans if they dismantle their compound and move it to the airport, as happened on the night of August 14th to 15th. After all, in the case of the Afghanistan mission, it was always said: In together, out together. It will therefore be interesting to see whether Chancellor Merkel will address this in her government statement. The case is likely to be more than a warning for further military cooperation.

Slow visa process

But it would be wrong to just point to the United States. Too much has gone wrong with the agreements within the federal government. Why didn’t she take care of flying out local staff from Mazar-i-Sharif after the Bundeswehr had withdrawn from the base there? Two planned charter flights to save people were planned for June, but then failed because of the bureaucracy.

The main point of contention: the issuing of visas. The federal government could have switched to the faster “Visa-on-arrival” procedure. Then the visas could not have been issued in a complicated way in Afghanistan, but after arriving in Germany. In July Merkel had advertised charter flights that would have been tied to such “Visa-on-arrival” procedures. However, the switch to the faster procedure did not come until August 13, shortly before the Taliban took Kabul.

Black Peter game behind the scenes

Behind the scenes, the seemingly unworthy Schwarzer-Peter game is in full swing. Both the Foreign Office and the Federal Ministry of the Interior say they proposed the change months earlier. But the Minister of the Interior is not responsible for issuing visas, Seehofer said at the federal press conference last week. It is unclear why his ministry is said to have insisted on the slower visa procedure before departure at a departmental meeting at the end of July. The faster procedure should only be used in exceptional cases, according to the request from his Ministry of the Interior.

What remains to be said is that the government did not ask any NGOs or think tanks about the BND’s findings, invoked statements made by the BND under certain premises, which then did not apply at all. The mutual accusations show that there was no uniform, joint approach by the ministries, but that those responsible only thought about their area of ​​responsibility. So there is a lot to talk about in the Bundestag.