Status: 23.08.2021 12:53 p.m.
Defense Minister Kramp-Karrenbauer wants to take political responsibility for the evacuation mission in Kabul. When the mission is over, she will take stock. “I turn my head,” she said in an interview.
Federal Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer has linked her political future to the course of the Bundeswehr’s current mission in Afghanistan. “Whatever happens on site: I turn my head,” she said on “Bild TV”.
In the interview, the minister announced that she would take stock of the evacuation mission and think about personal consequences:
When this mission is over, I will consider very carefully for myself what responsibility I have borne, what responsibility I have fulfilled, and where maybe not – and what conclusions I have to personally draw from it.
Concentrate on evacuation mission first
However, she made it clear that she would now concentrate on the evacuation mission first: “I am the owner of the command and control authority, and she must be on board at the front at the moment when such a dangerous military mission is underway I sent people too. “
Also in use outside the airport
For more than a week, the Bundeswehr has been flying people out of Afghanistan every day – this morning more than 2,700 so far. The German government has been criticized for not having flown out Afghan volunteers and other vulnerable Afghans before the radical Islamic Taliban came to power.
Today another Bundeswehr military aircraft took off from Kabul in the direction of Uzbekistan. According to the operational command, 198 “persons in need of protection” were on board.
Because of the dramatic situation at Kabul Airport and the partially blocked accesses, the Bundeswehr is now also deployed outside the protected airport to bring people safely to the evacuation flights.
“Obligation to these local staff”
Kramp-Karrenbauer said she wanted to get every single local worker out of Afghanistan. But there are still local staff who are not in the capital, Kabul. The question therefore arises as to how one can ensure that these people can be brought to Germany safely – in a month, in half a year or maybe in a year. This is what is currently being discussed, said the CDU politician. “If I have to sit down with the Taliban to do this – also as a government – then I will, because that is our obligation to these local staff as well.”
Misjudgments already admitted
The minister had previously – like Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas – admitted misjudgments of the situation in Afghanistan. “At the beginning of last week, nobody in the international community expected that Kabul would fall without a fight by the end of the week,” she wrote in a letter to members of the Bundestag that became known over the weekend. “Our assessment of the situation was wrong, and our assumptions about the capabilities and readiness of the Afghan resistance to the Taliban were overly optimistic.”
In a crisis discussion in the Chancellery under the leadership of Merkel on Sunday evening, however, it was not about personnel issues: “It was precisely about the question: Where are we with the evacuation, what are the political efforts doing.” In addition, it was about the extension of the evacuation mission.