The Bundestag wants to set up the first investigative committee of the 20th legislative period this Thursday with the votes of the traffic light coalition and the Union. He is to investigate the actions of the black-red federal government in connection with the withdrawal of the Bundeswehr from Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on August 15, 2021. The MPs also want to decide on the mandate for a commission of inquiry that will evaluate the entire 20-year mission in the Hindu Kush and derive lessons for current and future Bundeswehr missions abroad.
Both investigations had already been agreed in the coalition agreement between the SPD, the Greens and the FDP. Now the coalition has also agreed on the orders with the parliamentary groups of the CDU and CSU. The committee of inquiry should therefore examine the period from the conclusion of the Doha Agreement on February 29, 2020 between the US administration of President Donald Trump and the Taliban to the end of the military evacuation mission. In the agreement, the United States had agreed a deduction with the Taliban in return for security guarantees. The radical Islamists then took over province after province and after the collapse of the Afghan government also the capital Kabul.
As the strongest parliamentary group, the SPD provides the two chairmen. The committee of inquiry is to be headed by MP Ralf Stegner, and the commission of inquiry by Michael Müller; both belong to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Bundestag. Stegner said that he wanted to focus on communication between the federal government departments involved in the committee of inquiry, i.e. above all the Chancellery, Foreign Office, Federal Ministry of Defense and Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. It is important to find out how pictures of the situation came about that have subsequently proved to be untenable. The interaction with international partners such as the USA must also be examined.
To this day, thousands of local workers are waiting to leave for Germany
He also attaches great importance to the question of how to deal with Afghan local forces and cooperation with international aid organizations, he said on Wednesday in Berlin. Thousands of Afghans who had worked for the Bundeswehr and other German government agencies failed to board the evacuation flights that the US-led Western military alliance had been using for two weeks in an attempt to evacuate its own nationals and vulnerable Afghans to safety. To this day, thousands in Afghanistan are waiting to emigrate to Germany. In the meantime, the Federal Foreign Office has also brought thousands here, mostly via Pakistan.
Müller announced that the commission of inquiry would evaluate the entire operation and draw lessons for future mandates. In the first few years of the mission, there had definitely been successes in the fight against the threat of terrorism and terrorist groups. But one has to ask why it was not possible to stabilize and democratize state and society in the long term and to initiate sustainable development. He referred to the backsliding under the Taliban, for example with regard to the rights of women and girls.
He named two years as the minimum period for the work of the commission. Stegner said the report of the committee of inquiry should be discussed in the Bundestag with sufficient time before the next election. The committee wants to be constituted at the beginning of July before the parliamentary summer recess and request files from the government. The commission of inquiry will begin its actual work in September.