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You think there is tension between the U.S. military and its civilian leaders? I wouldn't want to be in charge of political-military relations in the Bundestag:
Yet politicians in Berlin, including Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung, dispute that Germany is fighting a "war" in Afghanistan.
They paint the troop presence as a "stabilization" mission and stress that the focus is on civilian reconstruction. This description is meant to reassure a public that remains deeply uncomfortable with the idea of German troops in combat, almost 65 years after the end of World War Two.
But the situation in Kunduz tells a very different story.
"All the soldiers in my company agree that this is war," said Captain Thomas K., 31, who faulted politicians for not discussing the mission and its dangers more openly with the German public.
"Fighting is always bad and one should avoid it if at all possible. But here, in this case, it can't be avoided. Definitely not."
I can't remember Congress formally declaring war on Afghanistan either ...
Anyways, Chancellor Merkel is a lot more outspoken on the use of force than Jung.
Which is why many commentators think that Jung won't be part of the new government ...
The legal situation in Germany is pretty fluid, as there is no [formal] law specifying the use of the Bundeswehr abroad.
While US lawyers are kinda happy with this kind of a situation, in a continental system it causes all kinds of problems ...
As the use of force is a hot topic in Germany, so far, nobody dared to seriously approach the issue.
We'll see if the new right wing coalition got the balls to do something about it ...
The situation in Sweden is very similar to the one in Germany. A Swedish/Finnish force makes up PRT Mazar-e-Sharif to the west of the German PRT Kunduz and since a couple months now ambushes, mines and IEDs have become a regular occurrence.
Now, in Sweden's case our armies haven't committed any war crimes for many centuries. Our orthodoxy is connected to smugness over having stayed out of war for exactly 200 years (the Russians handed our bottoms to us and walked of with Finland in 1809).
The only ones in the national political debate who call it a "war" are from the left., and it's usually preceded by "American" and "colonial". As in "why are we fighting in this unjust American colonial war against the Afghan people."
On the right, or perhaps rather amongst those who are pro national defence, there's widespread criticism of the "Afghanistan doctrine". Sweden is in the process of abolishing conscription for an all volunteer force by July next year. The (counter-)argument is that this small light and expeditionary army is designed to "defend Sweden in Afghanistan" but won't hold out five minutes against Russia.
So the centre-right government keeps calling it a "peace force", as did the social democrats when they held power, and hope against hope that things won't get any worse and that the planned marginal reinforcements will suffice.
I doubt they will.
We've been lucky so far but PRT MeS is right now about 600 Swedes and Finns spread very thinly over four provinces. Adding just another 100 or so would be laughable if it weren't so serious.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that everybody's got politics and that letting what makes sense politically preclude what's tactically sound is neither a uniquely American nor German phenomenon.
The worst part for the Germans is that because the politicians haven't agreed they are at war, every time a German soldier kills or injures someone, from a traffic accident to a clash with insurgents, the prosecutors in Potsdam open a case against him/her. And to top it off, while these manslaughter and attempted manslaughter cases are under investigation, the soldiers cannot be promoted. It's become an administrative nightmare given the recent amount of activity around Kunduz, on top of generally devastating morale.
Good grief. Grow up, people.
The reason German politicians don't want to call it a war is that they're not allowed to send troops overseas to fight in a war because of a couple of little fracas' that Germany got involved with last century. They can only send troops overseas for peacekeeping/reconstruction duties.
If you don't know what you're talking about you should really stop blogging. It's embarrassing.
In the 60's and 70's calling war a 'war' was the sort of talk that got you labelled a hippie pinko. Everyone knew Korea and Vietnam were just Police Actions AMIRITE?
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