By SPIEGEL Staff
KABUL, ISAF HEADQUARTERS, GREAT MASSOUD ROAD. The Taliban changed its tactics some time ago. Now it no longer attacks its enemies in open battle, but instead uses suicide bombings and plants explosive devices along roadsides. More than 1,000 Western soldiers have already lost their lives in Afghanistan. Most of them were Americans, but 152 Britons, 116 Canadians and 30 Germans have also died. In the seven years of the military mission there, Afghanistan has not become safer, neither for Afghans nor for the rest of the world. What is going wrong in Afghanistan?
The highest-ranking Western military official in Kabul, American four-star General David McKiernan, 57, is sitting in his office at the headquarters of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. The building, with its old wooden façade, is a former sports riding club, around which the NATO troops have built their container city in the middle of the Afghan capital. McKiernan has about 70,000 men under his command, including 62,000 ISAF troops from 42 countries. Most of them are Americans, however.
McKiernan is a tall, blonde man. He spent eight years living in Germany. In those days, the 1970s, the West's goal was to defend the famous Fulda Gap, that is, to prevent Warsaw Pact forces from marching into the West German state of Hesse through what was then the East German state of Thuringia. Today McKiernan's goal is to prevent al-Qaida fighters hiding in Afghanistan from "infiltrating Europe or the United States."
But at the moment McKiernan has other concerns. During a mission against an alleged Taliban group in the troubled Helmand province, ISAF soldiers inadvertently killed eight civilians. The population there is protesting against the Western allies. The commander of local British forces complains that the extremists used the victims as "human shields." Only a few days earlier, the deadly payload of a US fighter jet struck a group of nomads in Herat. In the Gozara district, American troops killed three terrorists, but three children, six women and four innocent men also died in the attack. In 2008, 2,118 civilians died, a 40 percent increase over the year before. Although the insurgents are responsible for most of the victims, a third of the casualties are caused by Western and Afghan forces.
"It'll get worse before it gets better," predicts an officer at McKiernan's headquarters in Kabul. He has his sights set on the "surge," a troop buildup that has already been announced. The GIs are doing something that many European NATO troops prefer to avoid: They are challenging the Taliban. It is already clear that 2009 will be the bloodiest year since the operation in Afghanistan began more than seven years ago. This has little to do with ISAF's original mandate.
In 2002, when the British General John McColl assembled the first 5,000 ISAF soldiers in Kabul after the war against the Taliban was over, their mission was merely to preserve the fragile peace. Today ISAF is a war machine geared toward achieving peace through violence. This was not what the NATO partners agreed to.
After the attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, the US's European allies believed that a situation in which they could be called upon to defend a common ally had occurred for the first time. But the Americans made no use of this offer. Instead, they asked for volunteers to join the Afghanistan mission. ISAF was created, as well as a robust counterterrorism force tightly managed by the Americans -- an effort to circumvent NATO's complicated political voting processes.
The result today is an alliance of the unwilling that has become almost impossible to maneuver. A number of NATO countries protect themselves against any overly intrusive demands by the Americans with secret "national provisos." After the United States had withdrawn many of its combat troops and special units to send them to Iraq, the forces remaining in Afghanistan suddenly needed every soldier they could get. But the NATO nations are pursuing their own interests in Afghanistan, which also affect how willing they are to make sacrifices. The Germans never truly believed that they were defending their democracy in the Hindu Kush, when former Defense Minister Peter Struck convinced them to extend their Afghanistan mission. They feel committed to the NATO alliance, but not without limits.
For a commander like McKiernan, the lack of a uniform commitment on the part of the NATO members is already practically the worst-case scenario. Because of the national provisos, known in military jargon as "caveats," he cannot deploy many contingents outside certain provinces, while others cannot be used to fight terrorists or in the war on drugs. The Germans have been especially adept at protecting their soldiers from dangerous missions. The lawyers in Berlin sent NATO "clarifying remarks" explaining that their men could only use lethal force in cases of self-defense or to protect innocent third parties. This categorically rules out an offensive hunt for the Taliban and makes the German contingent almost useless when it comes to effectively fighting the insurgency.
On the battlefield, this has given the Germans the reputation for being slackers, or "fair-weather warriors" who are never around when things get serious. "Is the life of a German soldier worth more than that of a Canadian?" the Montreal Gazette asked, after Germans had allegedly failed to support Canadian troops during heavy fighting in the south. "For us ze war is over by tea time, ja," Britain's Sunday Times wrote derisively, responding to reports that helicopters carrying German medics were leaving the operation zone "to comply with health and safety regulations" at about 4 p.m. every day, to ensure that they would reach their base by sundown.
McKiernan's displeasure is obvious. "The Germans are good soldiers, but it's a political decision," he says diplomatically. At the end of this week, US President Obama plans to introduce the US government's new strategy for the alliance's efforts in Afghanistan to his NATO partners. He will call it the "AfPak" paper, to emphasize the US government's intention to treat the Afghanistan-Pakistan region as a single entity in the future. The focus on Islamabad and the sanctuaries for the Taliban leadership and al-Qaida in Pakistan will be just as strong as it is on Kabul. Obama has recognized that the situation appears to have deteriorated, and that the West is "not winning the war" in Afghanistan. NATO, says Obama, must become stronger in Afghanistan and coordinate its forces more effectively. This, he says, will require a "more comprehensive strategy, a more focused strategy, a more disciplined strategy."
To achieve his goals, Obama is promising more soldiers and more money. Besides the additional 17,000 troops already announced, another 4,000 will be deployed as trainers and advisers to the Afghan armed forces. Obama wants the US Congress to approve a 60 percent hike in spending, which currently weighs in at about $2 billion (€1.48 billion) a month. The US president will also call upon the allies to up their commitments, if not militarily, then at least financially.
The goal, according to the Obama administration, is no longer to impose a Western-style democracy on Afghanistan. In Obama's view, the military mission cannot continue indefinitely, and an exit strategy is needed to remove US troops from their involvement in Afghanistan. Accordingly, the main, indispensable goal will be to deprive the al-Qaida terrorist organization of the safe havens from which it can conduct its worldwide terrorist operations.
Despite the American president's welcome new modesty, as well as his willingness to improve the living conditions of the Afghan population with a stronger civilian presence and to negotiate with "moderate" Taliban, there are doubts when it comes to the criteria his negotiating partners would have to fulfill. A German cabaret artist put it this way recently: "What exactly is a moderate Taliban? Someone who stones people to death with pebbles?"
When Obama presents his new strategy to allies at the summit later this week, only one thing will be clear: NATO is not about to run out of things to do -- at least not before the venerable alliance's 70th birthday.
ERICH FOLLATH, SUSANNE KOELBL, MATTHIAS SCHEPP, HANS-JÜRGEN SCHLAMP, ALEXANDER SZANDAR
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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