After the Bundeswehr's ISAF and OEF mandates were renewed for another twelve months by the German parliament in October and November 2007, respectively, it seemed that the country's military engagement in Afghanistan would be on the political backburner until later this summer. By that point existing domestic fault lines about the success or failure, legitimacy or illegitimacy, of the deployment were bound to come again to the fore ahead of the next annual parliamentary vote on the controversial deployment.
This Wednesday, however, the German defense ministry announced that about 240 Bundeswehr soldiers may take over from Norway the command of NATO's Quick Reaction Force (QRF) in northern Afghanistan. The left-wing SPD party (which is part of Chancellor Merkel's governing "grand coalition"), the Greens, and even the free-market FDP party are already positioning themselves against the Afghanistan deployment in a way that could yield electoral benefit in the future.
Already two-thirds of the German population is in favor of a swift Bundeswehr pullout from Afghanistan and views the U.S.-led OEF mission in a negative light.
The CDU/CSU-led defense ministry, for its part, stressed that no formal decision about the QRF--which provides force protection or serves as emergency back-up for NATO troops--would be made until a meeting with other NATO members later this month. Specifically, a spokesman for conservative CDU defense minister Franz-Josef Jung made clear his position that Germany's involvement in the QRF would be covered by the current ISAF mandate and would therefore not require a new vote by the Bundestag.
However, Rainer Arnold, the SPD Bundestag group's defense policy spokesman, immediately seized on the ministry's pronouncements to warn that the Bundeswehr's mission in Afghanistan would take on a "new quality" if Berlin took over the QRF command. In this context, he emphasized that the Bundeswehr infantry troops assigned to the QRF would be deployed for "combat missions" whereas Germany's current ISAF troops were only involved in "stabilization missions." Several other SPD and FDP MPs concurred with Arnold's assessment.
At first glance, the debate may not seem so significant. However, CDU/CSU strategists expect that the SPD is already building opposition to the next renewal of the OEF mandate, which currently allows up to 1,400 Bundeswehr soldiers as well as several German navy vessels to participate in U.S.-led anti-terror operations in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and beyond, and which is not specifically covered by a U.N. Security Council resolution (unlike ISAF for that matter). And in an interview with a Berlin-based newspaper published today, Rune Solberg, the QRF's outgoing Norwegian commander, warned Germany to brace itself for future Bundeswehr losses due to combat operations in Afghanistan. Such casualties will certainly strengthen the hand of those who would withdraw German forces from the fight entirely.
