Merkel’s government declaration: more questions than answers

At the end of her term in office, Chancellor Merkel is faced with a mess in foreign policy. But in her government statement on the Afghanistan disaster, she almost sounds like a retired Chancellor

At the moment, the expectations of the Chancellor could hardly be higher when she comes to the desk. A moment in which, even now, thousands of kilometers away in Kabul, people are trying to save life and limb. Including Afghan local staff who served the Bundeswehr or German aid organizations and presumably relied on the Germans not to be abandoned by the end of the international military operation in Afghanistan.

At this moment, Merkel must know that not all those authorized to leave the country will make it out of the country before the Afghanistan mission officially ends on August 31: her foreign minister already admitted this on Tuesday. “We will end these two weeks of evacuation with very unsatisfactory results,” said Afghanistan expert Markus Kaim daily news live.

Germany is now accused of failure to provide assistance by the German sponsorship network of Afghan local staff: Afghan helpers were deliberately left behind. You probably didn’t want the evacuation to really work, said Kava Spartak from the YAAR refugee aid agency ARD capital studio.

Foreign policy shambles

When Merkel came to the podium, the drama of the situation was palpable – her foreign minister and defense minister were sitting on the government bench, looking earnest with folded hands. The failure of parts of her cabinet in the late-start evacuation of the auxiliaries is in the room: At the end of her chancellorship, she is faced with a heap of foreign policy fragments.

At the beginning of the day, Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble warned: “The desperation of the people at the airport in Kabul tears your heart apart.” Their fate shakes the self-image of the West.

Almost presidential calm

Measured against this, the outgoing Chancellor developed an almost presidential calm in her government statement. It does not gloss over: The developments of the past few days are “terrible”. Of course, the events are also “bitter for the allies”. She admits that “the speed of development has obviously been underestimated”. That also applies to Germany.

And yet, your speech has something of a rested overall balance sheet of the 20-year mission, which seems inappropriate in this critical moment of crisis. She describes her government’s dilemma in deciding to find the right time to evacuate the local staff. If you had brought this with you as a precautionary measure in the spring, the people in Afghanistan would have felt abandoned. Merkel’s explanations sound a little as if she were explaining her politics to an interested degree in political science.

But only in the past few days have foreign policy-makers from their own party such as Norbert Röttgen talked about nothing less than a “major failure in foreign policy”. Röttgen was referring to the entire Western community and not just the Merkel cabinet – but it bears part of the current responsibility there. And the CDU MP and former Colonel of the Bundeswehr, Roderich Kiesewetter, tweeted ruefully last week that the Greens’ motion in June, which had called for an accelerated admission of Afghan local staff, should have been approved.

In her speech, Merkel returns to the beginnings of the military intervention, i.e. to the red-green government under SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. She quotes Fischer and the then SPD Defense Minister Peter Struck with his now famous sentence that Germany’s security is also being defended in the Hindu Kush. For Merkel, this has the advantage of taking responsibility for the opposition parties, which are currently sparking criticism of the evacuation disaster. Because the operation has so far been supported by all parties in the Bundestag except for the Left Party.

Green foreign politician Jürgen Trittin foamed on Twitter: “After 16 years of responsibility, Angela Merkel can only think of questions about Afghanistan – as if she had not governed, and as if the Union and the SPD had not regularly rejected requests for an independent evaluation of the German mission.”

FDP politician Marco Buschmann also sees Merkel as responsible here. He criticized the lack of clarification in the government statement daily news live, especially when it comes to the three lost days in the current evacuation. The Union’s foreign politician and parliamentary group vice-president Johann Wadephul attributed responsibility to Foreign Minister Heiko Maas: The SPD minister clearly had the lead and should have given more gas – that must be relentlessly clarified.

The Left Party abstained from the current evacuation mission, which had to be approved retrospectively: It is absolutely clear that the people on the ground need to be helped – and much earlier at the request of their parliamentary group, said parliamentary group leader Amira Mohamed Ali daily news live. “But we are not prepared to approve of the wrongdoing in retrospect”.

Merkel’s large catalog of questions

Merkel sticks to her broad bow and at the end of her government declaration asks delicate and thoroughly self-critical questions, the answers of which must be taken time. Future German foreign policy also depends on it. For example: “Were our goals too ambitious?” Or: “Wasn’t it at least extremely risky, if not wrong, to (provide) the negotiations in Doha in 2020 for the US agreement with the Taliban on troop withdrawal with fixed withdrawal dates?” – These thoughtful words by the Chancellor are sure to pick up speed in the political debate, said the political scientist Benjamin Höhne in the special broadcast of daily news live. Indeed, on the very fundamental question of how to export Western democratic values ​​in future missions.

So there are still a lot of foreign policy issues that still need to be clarified. But no longer from the Chancellor, but from a new federal government – or even an investigative committee. After all, it was Merkel’s presumably last government declaration of her term in office.