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Schröder on Sept. 11 and Afghanistan

"I Remember My Own Tears"

In the months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the US enjoyed Germany's 'unlimited solidarity' -- support which led to Germany sending troops to Afghanistan. Soon, though, the solidarity began to fray.

When two hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center towers on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, it didn't take long for the shock waves to reach the German Chancellery. Chancellor Schröder was busy writing his speech for the next day's presentation of the budget to the Bundestag, Germany's parliament. "Business as usual," as he writes in his freshly-published memoirs.

He would never give the speech. Shortly before 3 p.m. German time, Schröder's assistant barged into his office with news of the attack:

"I turned on the television. The images that I saw deeply upset me …. I remember seeing desperate people jumping out of the windows of the Twin Towers. I remember people who were running for their lives on the streets, and I remember my own tears, cried out of sympathy for those innocent people who were exposed to the inferno. Helplessness and rage at those who did this were my first reactions."

Schröder quickly mobilized his government to determine if Germany was at risk and to decide what the country's reaction should be. Immediately, he pledged "unlimited solidarity" to the United States and promised to help America track down and punish those responsible for the attacks. He then set to work on his speech to the nation, fully aware that the world had become a radically different place. And one of those changes was a positive one:

"Never before and never since … was there such a worldwide consensus when it came to solidarity with the United States as there was then. From the beginning, the question for (Foreign Minister Joschka) Fischer and I was not whether Germany would participate in military measures, but how to support those measures."

The decision to participate in the military offensive in Afghanistan, which resulted in the removal of the radical Islamist Taliban from power, was a relatively easy one for Schröder to make. For him, he writes, it was vital that Germany "take its share of the responsibility for the fate of the world." But it turned out not to be quite so easy to convince his Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Fischer's Green Party, both of which had factions dead set against military involvement. "I called that organized irresponsibility."

Schröder makes clear it was his conviction that the invasion of Afghanistan was the right thing to do. Indeed, parts of his book read like yet one more attempt to convince Germans of that fact. But despite the success of the invasion, Schröder writes that he was aware that the international community would have to remain in Afghanistan for an extended period.

"In 2002, the search for the right strategy to follow in Afghanistan after the initial military successes was underway. We in Berlin weren't the only ones who were convinced that Afghanistan would tie down our efforts for a long time. Under no circumstances could we leave our work unfinished -- which would amount to an invitation to the Taliban to once again bring the country under their fundamentalist regime."

But it wasn't long, Schröder writes, before ominous tones began emerging from Washington, D.C. US President George W. Bush gave a speech on Jan. 29, 2002 in which he brought into existence the Axis of Evil -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

"Inside the German government's security cabinet, we quickly agreed that these proclamations revealed a dimension of the conflict beyond that of resisting fundamental-religious terrorism. We searched futilely for a connection with Sept. 11 and with al-Qaida."

The solidarity Germans felt with America immediately following the attacks of Sept. 11 -- an outpouring of emotion that resulted in spontaneous gatherings of hundreds of thousands of Germans in cities across the country on the evening of Sept. 11 and on the day after -- evaporated quickly when Bush began beating the war drum for Iraq. Schröder promised his electorate that he would not "take part in any adventures" and soon promised that Germany would not under any circumstances join the US in an offensive against Iraq.

For Schröder, one of the decisive moments marking the erosion of worldwide support for the US was then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation before the UN Security Council attempting to prove the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.

"Such appearances contributed greatly to the fact that the post-Sept. 11 solidarity with the US felt the world over metamorphosed into exactly the opposite. For all friends of the United States -- and I count myself among them -- the question as to why war (with Iraq) was necessary is not yet conclusively answered."

Schröder's memoir makes it clear that he was also concerned about the consequences of a war in Iraq for the mission in Afghanistan:

"In the run-up to the Iraq war, Kofi Annan expressed his fear that troops would leave Afghanistan too soon. ... Annan predicted -- which also reflected our concerns -- that Afghanistan might be abandoned too soon if the United States changed its strategy. The large-scale withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan needed for the war in Iraq was a repetition of the mistake against which Annan had warned, but in vain. This mistake is coming home to roost today, now that the Taliban fighters have regained strength on Afghanistan's battlefields."