analysis
Status: 08/27/2021 5:20 p.m.
The Afghanistan crisis accompanied Chancellor Merkel throughout her entire term in office – and pushed her to her limits. Most recently, the otherwise sure-footed Chancellor lacked a sense of the situation.
Thursday 6:30 p.m.: Dozens of people have just died in Kabul. US soldiers, women, children. German soldiers fly out of Kabul by emergency evacuation. Chancellor Angela Merkel spares two and a half minutes of her time on the sidelines of a press conference in the Chancellery on the tragedy in Afghanistan: “I would like to say a few words about Afghanistan on the current occasion. The details will be given later by the ministers.”
Merkel and her sense of style. The woman, who for years walked so sure-footedly through crises, turns the hour in which the most dangerous evacuation mission in the history of the Bundeswehr ends happily into a side note with detailed questions that others should clarify.
Film premiere instead of a crisis meeting
Wednesday, August 16: The first Bundeswehr plane lands in Kabul. Thousands of local workers are scared to death. The outcome is uncertain. The Chancellor goes to the cinema premiere of “Die Unbeugsamen” in the evening. Merkel and her sense of style.
“I am ashamed of it, I am ashamed of it, I wish that this federal government would finally take responsibility. At least apologize to the soldiers and local staff.” Half of what the Green politician Cem Özdemir says may be an election campaign. The other half is the realization that this Chancellor is finding it difficult to cope with the German government’s loss of control in Afghanistan. Instead of naming her own mistakes, she made her government statement to justify the government and insulted those who voiced the mistakes: “Afterwards, doing precise analyzes afterwards is not really complicated, knowing and foreseeing everything afterwards is relatively effortless.”
No answers, questions instead
It is the simplest – critics say, cheapest – variant to dismiss every criticism as a know-it-all of the wise men. “Anyone can do it afterwards,” says a Chancellor who usually had a reputation for thinking things through from the end. But she gave no answers now. She asked questions: “Were our goals too ambitious? Have we underestimated the level of corruption in Afghanistan? Did our goals and values really reach Afghanistan?”
André Wüstner from the Bundeswehrverband defends the Bundeswehr. He defends the Chancellor in the ARD after this speech no more: “Even when she raised questions at the end, many soldiers asked themselves afterwards: These are questions that had to be answered all the time. Why weren’t there? the past few years? “
Merkel is reaching her limits
She is known as the crisis chancellor. The Afghanistan crisis, however, is pushing Merkel to the limits of her crisis.
Berlin 2012: Nine years ago the Chancellor was sitting in the Chancellery with the then Afghan President Hamid Karzai. And says what now, nine years later, no longer applies: “The mistakes should not be made that have happened so often in Afghanistan in the past. That countries are committed to you and suddenly left and Afghanistan was left alone again . That is exactly what should be prevented. “
Karzai sat motionless and listened then. He, who later gave its name to the international airport in Kabul, which has now become the location and epitome of the tragedy of Afghanistan. Merkel, who was so surprised by the collapse of the Afghan army in August 2021.
Eleven years earlier, however, she already knew what would happen if corruption and incompetence reigned: “Even if all Afghan security forces are trained, the international community will ensure that the army and police are viable. Otherwise, the Taliban’s hope could be to strike immediately if the police and the army are no longer properly paid and motivated. “
Eleven years later, the Taliban struck because the international community had failed to make the army viable. In the last days of Merkel’s chancellorship, it became clear that the war in Afghanistan has never actually been her war in the 16 years under her responsibility. A war that has been lost, a whole country possibly at the same time: “This new reality is bitter. But we have to deal with it,” says the Chancellor.