Afghanistan: The long shadow of the Kunduz affair

2021-02-16T20:37:24.691Z

Colonel Klein did nothing wrong when bombing civilians in Kunduz, a court says. At the same time, NATO wants to extend its deployment in Afghanistan. Both show that the alliance is cheating on itself above all else.

Icon: enlarge

NATO soldiers and local emergency services inspect the burned-out tank trucks on September 6, 2009 - two days after the fatal attack

Photo: A2800 epa Jawed Kargar / dpa

Seven army workers were fatally injured on Sunday night when the Taliban raided their post in northern Kunduz province.

On February 6, two soldiers and a secret service agent died in the hail of bullets from the insurgents in the south of the province; on February 5, the Taliban overran a position in the east of Kunduz and shot 18 uniformed men.

On February 2, four police officers died in an hour-long gun battle in the center of Kunduz.

Kunduz, once a synonym for the German armed forces in Afghanistan, has become a combat zone, one of many in the murderous advance of the Taliban.

They want to bring the government in Kabul to collapse, while the foreign troops should have left the country by May 1st.

So it was negotiated a year ago between the administration of Donald Trump and emissaries of the Taliban.

"Only small traces of human material"

Icon: enlarge

Burned-out tanker trucks: Two 250-kilo bombs hit at 1:49 a.m., killing almost exclusively civilians

Photo: STR / AFP

The Federal Ministry of Defense later announced lapidary that "between 17 and 142" people died in the attack by American jets.

In the morning, German military police could have found "only small traces of human material" at the point where the two bombs hit.

Only the Taliban had died, announced the then Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung (CDU) even after rows of injured civilians and children had been admitted to the Kunduz hospitals.

After the ministry and the judiciary were unable to detect any wrongdoing up to the Federal Constitutional Court, victim lawyers in Strasbourg filed a lawsuit on behalf of the farmer Abdul Hanan, whose two sons had perished at the time.

But the European Court of Human Rights ruled negative: At the time, Colonel Klein acted to the best of his knowledge and belief.

There are no blatant legal deficiencies in the processing, so there is no reason to reopen the proceedings.

What looks like the mere coincidence of the current wildfire and the assessment of a tragic individual case more than a decade ago are in fact two excesses of the same cause: this intervention does not work.

The attempt to shape a state according to the will and imagination of the intervening powers with billions and billions, with tens of thousands of NATO soldiers, with the advancement of women and air strikes from Afghanistan, ceased to be a success long before the tanker trucks were bombed.

The enemies of the enemy are not friends either

The assumption of George W. Bush, 2001 US President, and his neo-conservative cabinet of illusionists that one only had to bring the enemies of one's enemies to power in order to make friends went wrong.

Because in Afghanistan it was a matter of lifting those warlords back to their thrones, whose greed and horror had made the passage of the Taliban possible.

Some of them are still there today, such as Vice-President "Marshal" Raschid Dostum, who has been accused of the mass murder of captured Taliban to the rape of insubordinate followers, and this has been proven in detail.

Icon: enlarge

Vice-President “Marshal” Raschid Dostum: Allegations range from rape to mass murder

Photo:?

Caren Firouz / Reuters / REUTERS

In 2006, at the latest, when the attacks on Afghan and foreign soldiers became more and more numerous, the Taliban were back.

Not "still there," as the Pentagon and German defense ministers like to claim.

After years in which Pashtuns, members of Afghanistan's largest ethnic group and home of the Taliban movement, were harassed in many places like subjugated people in their own country, the Taliban formed again.

The Bundeswehr soldiers in the north still like to rave about "Bad Kunduz" and the quiet in their provinces.

The Germans were popular in Kunduz at the time, they built schools and bridges, and seldom shot.

But when a new police chief was appointed by Kabul in 2007 and established his regime of terror in Kunduz, and had farmers and their market stalls beaten down if they did not give enough bribes, the soldiers watched from their hill above the city.

You are only here as the Afghan Government's "Assistance Force".

The Taliban returned to Kunduz, taking over village after village in the Pashtun regions.

Until that fateful September 3, 2009, when a small group of fighters stopped the two tank trucks on the highway and shot one of the drivers who told them that with a fully loaded truck you could never get through the steep ford.

It was over with "Bad Kunduz"

Colonel Georg Klein was the commanding officer of the Kunduz camp at the time, an exemplary theoretician of the mission, to whom one of his officers now told that the hundreds of people that were broadcast as glowing hidden spots by the thermal imaging cameras of the reconnaissance aircraft were all Taliban.

An Afghan informant who was questioned several times by telephone had also confirmed this.

Colonel Klein 2009

Photo: Anja Niedringhaus / AP

That the informant was a former tea messenger from the local Afghan secret service who did not even have visual contact with the ford and apparently said what they wanted to hear from him, that the air traffic control officer lied to the headquarters in Kabul that they already had contact with the enemy in order to get air support : irrelevant.

Just like Klein's later, unsupported statement that there was an immediate danger to the camp.

The Taliban wanted to fill the tank trucks with explosives and use them as rolling bombs against the camp.

But from their hilltop fortress, the Germans themselves could see every approaching moped for almost a kilometer before it even reached the concrete barriers of the outpost.

The five requests by the two American pilots to drive the crowd around the trucks away by flying over them at a low altitude was just as often rejected by the Germans: Klein and his officers wanted to kill, not chase them away.

They just wanted to kill

When the two 250-kilo bombs finally hit at 1:49 a.m., they almost exclusively hit the poor farmers in the surrounding villages, who had come with plastic bottles and buckets to loot the fuel.

Icon: enlarge

An injured man is taken to hospital in a taxi after the attack (2009)

Photo: STRINGER / AFGHANISTAN / REUTERS

All these striking fallacies and protective claims were accepted with a legal shrug of the shoulders in the following year-long investigations.

Georg Klein continued his career, most recently as a general in the armed forces office in Bonn.

According to his subjective perception, he let the Taliban attack, the final decision of the Court of Human Rights.

"We won't leave until the time is right."

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg

In 2013 the Bundeswehr closed its camp in Kunduz, last November the last 100 soldiers were withdrawn there, just as the development workers have long since disappeared from the province.

The 20 Years War

The operation, which is going into its twentieth year, should finally come to an end, was already decreed in 2019 by Donald Trump, then US President, and had his negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad negotiate a withdrawal agreement directly with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar - excluding the Afghan government, that was the condition been the Taliban.

By May 1, the remaining 9,600 NATO soldiers are said to have left the country, including 4,500 Americans and more than 1,100 Germans, the second largest contingent.

But in view of the escalating violence against security forces, but also against judges, administrative heads and journalists, there is increasing international reserve against the withdrawal agreed in February 2020.

"We will not leave before the right time has come," said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Monday.

Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) also seconded that the mission should be carried out in such a way "that the peace process is not endangered."

Khalilzad, who was taken over by the new US administration, called for a "conditional strategy that would bring Afghanistan peace and a stable future to Afghanistan" via Twitter, after throwing such conditions overboard in the negotiations.

Except for two: no more Taliban support for al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups and no attacks on US troops.

At least the Taliban have adhered to the latter; they have not killed an American soldier for a year.

Instead, the Taliban are now constantly attacking the troops of the Afghan government, which were not at the table during the negotiations.

Icon: enlarge

Debris after a bomb attack in Afghanistan (October 2020): attacks are again the order of the day

Photo: PARWIZ / REUTERS

An American commission, co-chaired by retired top general Joseph Dunford, warns against the complete withdrawal by the agreed date: "That would simply make the Taliban winners," said Dunford.

The withdrawal must be postponed "in order to give the peace process time for an acceptable result."

There is now “a real opportunity” for this.

A castle in the air with a flag

Dunford, Maas, Stoltenberg, they all sound conclusive with their concerns.

Alone: What they are proposing is what their predecessors have been proposing for 15 years.

You just have to stay a little longer to achieve all that, unfortunately, you haven't achieved before.

Create a sustainable Afghan government, committed security forces who are maintaining all the progress that has been made since 2001: freedom, more equality for women, a democratic system.

But what emerged there thrived in the bubble of foreign military power, reconstruction aid and billions from the USA, Japan, and Europe.

For 20 years, Afghan rulers have not cared about being able to govern alone.

The two favorites of the 2019 elections took half a year and both of them were temporarily proclaimed president before they - under pressure - formed a government.

To this day, many army officers prefer to steal the wages and petrol of their troops rather than devote themselves to the defense of their state.

To withdraw in less than three months would in fact mean leaving Afghanistan to the Taliban or to the civil war of the provincial warlords, much like after the withdrawal of the Soviet Union in 1989. But to claim that a few months would turn the tide is self-deception, is the continuation of the same whitewashing that has received a castle in the air for more than a decade.

Icon: The mirror

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2021-02-16