German Politics Thread

I guess the argument is that we can't leave until the government in Kabul can defend itself properly. But I wonder, is there really any perspective that this will happen eventually?

Not without substantial, extensive and expensive reforms of the government, the ANA, and the coalition forces remaining in Afghanistan.

Basically...and I kind of get the argument that if we just leave Afghanistan all soldiers who died over there died for nothing in the end. But it just doesn't seem as if the country is getting its act together. Like, at all.

That's because the government in Kabul we installed largely represents only one ethnic group that has been the traditional enemy of most of southern Afghanistan. On top of that, the local police are the people who commit the most crime, including kidnapping and sexually molesting young boys, and shooting them if they try to escape. And the ANA isn't anywhere near able to engage the Taliban and come out on top.

And the Western powers are backing this regime because the civilian leaders either don't know that they have replaced the Taliban with even worse people, or because they're being fed bullshit by the military observers in Afghanistan. Like the soldiers themselves are, because some translators are there to retain morale, not translate accurately.

I doubt that the current regime is worse than the Taliban, but it is certainly not working.

Certainly didn't help that someone prioritised self-interest over what the locals wanted and pushed for a corrupt (and completely unreliable) puppet instead of the guy people actually wanted to be in charge.

edited 8th Aug '17 4:59:37 AM by DrunkenNordmann

Everything's relative. If the rule of law doesn't work because the police and the judiciary are criminals, one of the pillars of democracy is gone and it becomes weaker.

And if the only thing we've managed in over a decade of counterinsurgency and nation-building is 'well at least they're not the Taliban', I can't exactly blame the Afghan population for just keeping their heads down and playing both sides.

It's worth noting that a great many locally elected officials also have Taliban affiliations, it's just swept under the rug in official reports because it implies a negotiation with terrorists.

The US also rushed the initial reconstruction and nation-building in Afghanistan because they were gearing up to invade Iraq as well.

But the international community backed the invasion of Afghanistan. If the US wasn't going to shoulder the burden, someone else should have picked it up. Nobody ever did.

edited 8th Aug '17 5:06:44 AM by math792d

Germany tried. But there is little to work with in Afghanistan. Once or twice they did manage to install honest and somehow respected man - always resulted in him getting murdered at the first opportunity.

The thing is "the population isn't to blame" is a nonsense claim. If you don't stand up against what is wrong, you are part of the problem. Germans know this perfectly well from their own history. As long as the afghans put local power plays and their personal advantage over trying to protect the population in general (and both genders), there is little a foreign power can do, this is a change which has to come from the inside. The only thing which can be done is setting up safe zones to limit the number of refugees.

Nobody's going to mention the elephant in the room? Opium?

And who's wrong? The foreigners in body armor, tanks and helicopters destroying compounds from the skies, who don't speak the language, and who keep putting corrupt, child-raping, northern tribesmen into positions of abuse and power don't look like much just because their opposition was an oppressive dictatorship that, nonetheless, replaced the warlords that were even worse.

Many of whom those body-armored foreigners have now set to running the country.

Who's 'right'?

A whole other problem that, paradoxically, is being exaggerated by an international attempt to rectify the problem. Also, something like 50% of the heroin in Europe comes from Afghanistan, so there are white collar criminals with a vested interest.

The Germans could have used the same argument after WWII...and that includes the part with the corrupt people being put in a position of power, as well as a war by proxy about to happen in their country. They took a stance and then focussed on rebuilding.

Look, if the Afghan tribes want a better situation in their own country, they need to let go of their old grudges and work together against the Taliban, while also communicating clearly toward forces in their country what they need. As long as they secretly help the Taliban or look in the other direction when they see other people doing it, there will never be peace in the region.

edited 8th Aug '17 8:05:57 AM by Swanpride

Are you seriously drawing a comparison between postwar Germany and Afghanistan? Because that has to be the worst take on counterinsurgency I have ever seen.

And those grudges go back centuries. It would be like saying the North and South Koreans had to work together to defeat the Kims. Also, only the South Koreans get any representation in government above local level.

Also, on the note of Germany specifically: At its operational peak, Germany had 2.250 troops stationed in Afghanistan, mostly in the quiet northern provinces.

Denmark, a country with one tenth of the economic output, one fifteenth the military strength, one tenth the population and with no history of deployment outside Europe since the colonial era, sent 750 troops to Helmand, the most brutal province in the entire country.

If that's the Germans trying, I am hardly impressed. And I'm not saying that to toot some nationalist horn, I'm saying that kind of reluctance and hoop-jumping is part of why we're in this mess now.

edited 8th Aug '17 8:13:26 AM by math792d

The point is that putting the problems in Afghanistan down to outside influence alone is ignoring problems present in the culture itself, and that one shouldn't just excuse the population for silently approving of toxic behaviour.

Also, yes, the Germans were at the peaceful regions. That was our job. We were supposed to help with rebuilding, coming in as the benevolent force considering that Germany doesn't have the negative history with Afghanistan the US and the UK have. And we failed. But we tried. We truly tried to do for Afghanistan what the US did for us, or at least create a measure of order the same way the UN soldiers managed to do in the Balkans. And the main reason we failed is because there are forces within Afghanistan which make rebuilding practically impossible.

Germany had at their peak 5300 soldiers (and roughly 200 police officers) in Afghanistan. Germany is also the third biggest aid donator to Afghanistan after the USA and Japan and suffered the 5th most casualities among coalition troops.

edited 8th Aug '17 8:29:53 AM by Zarastro

I mean, if that was the job, the political leadership on both ends seriously fucked it.

Also, you can just come out and say 'they're brown' when you're talking about irreconcilable factors in propping up an Afghan state. I get it.

Private or public aid donations? And who decided where the money went? Genuinely curious.

edited 8th Aug '17 8:45:00 AM by math792d

I only read something about public donation, but private donation is also probably also significant. Most of the money went to North Afghanistan, and supposedly a lot of the infrastructure where done in accordance with the many local tribes. I once saw a documentation that showed how two villages wanted to have a paved road between them, so the Germans offered the money and the workers were recruited in the villages.

Also regarding child abuse, I didn't know this before, but it looks like this is a serious problem in Afghanistan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi

" In a 2013 Vice Media, Inc. documentary titled "This Is What Winning Looks Like", British independent film-maker Ben Anderson describes the systematic kidnapping, sexual enslavement and murder of young men and boys by local security forces in the Afghan city of Sangin. The film depicts several scenes of Anderson along with American military personal describing how difficult it is to work with the Afghan police considering the blatant molestation and rape of local youth. The documentary also contains footage of an American military advisor confronting the then acting Police Chief on the abuse after a young boy is shot in the leg after trying to escape a police barrack. When the Marine suggests that the barracks be searched for children, and that any policeman found to be engaged in pedophilia be arrested and jailed, the high-ranking officer insists what occurs between the security forces and the boys is consensual, saying "[the boys] like being there and giving their asses at night." He went on to claim that this practice was historic and necessary. "If [my commanders] don't fuck the asses of those boys, what should they fuck? The pussies of their own Grandmothers?"[31]"

Holy shit... . That is so sickening.

edited 8th Aug '17 9:01:30 AM by Zarastro

It's a significant problem, and the US forces can't legally intervene because they can't interfere in the police or the ANA's business. And since political leaders back home aren't informed of this, or deliberately ignore it, nothing gets done, because the coalition leadership want to save face more than they want to fix Afghanistan. The national police have a good reputation, but the southern police forces and local constables are rotten to thethe core.

I recommend looking into that documentary, by the way. Startlingly good, very insightful about the state Afghanistan is in and how things looked in 2013, when there were still coalition forces there. The same author traveled to Afghanistan multiple times, writing a book on his observations and releasing footage of two deployments - one with British forces and one with American marines.

There's more than one instance of ANA troops smoking weed whilst being shot at.

edited 8th Aug '17 9:06:06 AM by math792d

Afghanistan does have genuine systematic problems with it, the current setup doesn't allow for enforced ethnics like happened with Germany, Japan, Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor (in Bosnia the UN/EU appointed overseer could fire anyone they liked if pushed) and then there's Pakistan...

That's the real fundamental problem with Afghanistan, it's not the people, it's not the culture, it's the nuke wielding fundamentalists next door who want Afghanistan to be a chaotic mess ruled by the Taliban.

No, the problem is NOT that they are brown (and honestly, making this accusation is a very cheap way of derailing a serious discussion back to the simple "let's blame the west" answer). The problem is that the whole middle east is a political basket case and this is only partly because of the intervention of outside forces. I would have told you exactly the same thing 20 years ago about Northern Irland, that outside intervention will help very little as long as there is locally not enough will to stop the violence. Thankfully this changed with time.

As long as there are forces who want to mess up Afghanistan, and said forces get considerable help inside the borders of Afghanistan, trying to change anything is nearly impossible. Germany has financed countless projects to make the life of the people living there easier, projects which consisted of way more than just building a local police force.

Also, Denmark should have stopped with Afghanistan instead of offering forces for Iraq, too.

edited 8th Aug '17 1:01:35 PM by Swanpride

Yes we should have. Unfortunately the Prime Minister at the time was a personal friend of George Bush and pushed significantly for war, especially because he could take the opportunity to shit on the 1940 government for surrendering to the Nazis and, by proxy, shit on the Social Democrats.

In the end, something like 52% of parliament voted in favour of war. Because of this, the rules have changed so a mandate for war requires a 2/3 majority.

I mean I'm not sad to see a motherfucker who was gassing Kurds and invading Iran go, but there is such a thing as biting over more than you can chew.

edited 8th Aug '17 3:01:58 PM by math792d

The sad thing is that Afghanistan used to have functioning society with a relatively effective civil service. It even had an impressive number of women in higher positions. Then the Taliban came, fired all women, and replaced them with people who could not even read... .

It's still worth pointing out that said society, like the current one, was only sustaining itself out of the virtue of massive foreign aid from a foreign superpower (the Soviets then, the US ironically now), and was otherwise sitting atop of a powder keg of ethnic conflicts and divisions waiting to explode the moment said foreign superpower withdraw the bulk to all of its support.

There was a time before that too. Afghanistan was a great power on par with Mughal India and Safavid Iran and Romanov Russia (and probably the Ottomans too) in its Durrani Days. Even afterwards, it largely kept pace with the world. The middle of the twentieth century was that one bad day.

And I have a question. The German Basic Law seems to uphold the primacy of international law. ^note  Article 25 "The general rules of international law shall be an integral part of federal law. They shall take precedence over the laws and directly create rights and duties for the inhabitants of the federal territory." according to wikisource So, how do you define "the general rules of international law?"

The paragraph means exactly what is written, international right trumps national law....but what actually counts as international rights, well, when in doubt that is mostly for the judges in Karlsruhe to decide. But basically the UN charter and other international agreements like the Geneva convention. .

I guess this is kind of difficult to comprehend for someone who hasn't studied law (such as myself). Unfortunately the explanations I found are very complicated and use terms I have no idea how to translate into English and I also didn't find a good example when it applies.

One explanation I found mention that the Geneva convention doesn't count because it is some sort of treaty, or something like that. I guess I would have to look for a law book to properly understand this.

Somewhat depressingly, article 25 seems to be used by those lunatics who claim that Germany has no proper constitution/ is under foreign occupation/ doesn't exist as a state/ exists in the borders of 1937/ and other crazy stuff. Those guys claim that according to GG 25, international law supercedes the the constitution, while the article is interpreted by lawyers to state that international law supercedes federal law, but not the constitution.