By Conn Hallinan – November 15, 2009
“We deeply regret” are words that almost always end with
something terrible. They were uttered by German Defense Minister Franz Joseph
Jung in the wake of a Sept. 4 air strike that left upwards of 100 Afghans dead.
He followed it with a boilerplate that invariably makes such apologies suspect:
“We had reliable intelligence that our soldiers were in danger.”
Jung had nothing of the sort, but the minister’s deception
had less to do with the military’s standard instinct to lie, than with the
arithmetic of Germany’s federal elections.
The Afghans, most of them farmers from a local village, were
incinerated to make sure that German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian
Democratic Union (CDP) and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s Social
Democratic Party (SDP) did not overly suffer for their support of the war.
The tale is a chilling one.
According to Der
Spiegel, at 8 P.M. on the night of Sept. 4 a German intelligence officer in
the northern province of Kunduz took a call from Afghan security forces
indicating that the local Taliban had hijacked two fuel tankers. His commander,
Col. Georg Klein, asked for air reconnaissance, and a U.S. B-1B long range
bomber spotted the trucks stuck in the sand of the Kunduz River. The B-1B sent
pictures, but apparently they were grainy, dark and hard to read.
At 10 P.M. a local Afghan informant told Klein there were no
civilians around the vehicles, but lots of Taliban, including four leaders. At
a little past 1 A.M., two F-15 fighters showed up.
Under the General Rules of Engagement and Standard
Operations Procedures—the military loves to wrap mayhem in the language
of maintenance manuals—the trucks could not be attacked. One, there were
no NATO troops on the scene. Two, a single informant is not enough to initiate
an attack. And three, it was not a “time sensitive” target, that is, one that
was going somewhere. The trucks had been stuck for four hours.
But Klein called for an air strike anyway, even after the
F-15 pilots asked him to confirm that German forces were involved and that the
tankers posed an “imminent threat.” Assured on both points, the planes released
two GBU-38 radar guided bombs, each with a 500 lb warhead. The target dissolved
in an enormous fireball.
From all accounts Bundeswehr Col. Klein is no gung-ho heir
of the Wehrmacht. He drinks tea, goes to the opera and worries about his men.
When a local Afghan boy was shot at a roadblock, he personally apologized to
the family.
So what made him launch an attack that violated every rule
of engagement?
“Klein knew that in a past incident the insurgents had
detonated a tanker truck in Kandahar, killing dozens of civilians,” writes Der Spiegel. “He had also received
visits from a number of leading politicians, from Merkel and Steinmeier as well
as Defense Minister Franz Joseph Jung (CDU) and his predecessor Peter Struck
(SDP). Klein knows that they fear nothing more than an attack on German troops
shortly before the upcoming parliamentary elections.”
According to the German paper, Afghan informants told Klein
back in August that the Taliban were planning an assault on the German camp
using trucks. But Klein should have known that it was unlikely that such an
attack would be tried with huge, slow moving fuel tankers.
Indeed, Mullah
Shamsuddin, the commander of the Taliban forces who seized the trucks, had no
intention of using the trucks as suicide bombs. “Fuel tankers are far too
impractical in terrain like this,” he told Der
Spiegel in a phone interview. “We simply planned to drive them to Chahar
Dara and unload the fuel there. We can always use supplies.”
Instead the trucks got bogged down and the Taliban recruited
local farmers—many at gunpoint—to try to pull them out of the sand.
The locals also brought fuel cans to fill. “We knew the fuel was stolen, but we
were forced to go there,” says a young farmer, Mohammed Nur. When the bombs
hit, he was badly wounded. His two brothers died.
When the story broke, the Germans went into full spin mode.
Defense Ministry flak Captain Christian Dienst told the media, “According to
our knowledge at present, no civilians were present,” and then scolded the
press for speculating while sitting “in their warm chairs in Berlin.” The
Ministry also leaked a false story that Klein had used reconnaissance drones
and that there was a second intelligence source.
But as the evidence piled up, the Ministry’s denials began
to unravel. Interviews by the group Afghan Rights Monitor found that the dead
included 12 Taliban members and 79 villagers. Soon the Defense Ministry found
itself under assault not just from its own media, but also from its allies in
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Almost before the fires went out
on banks of the Kunduz River, out came the long knives.
The U.S, struck first. U.S. commander Gen. Stanley
McChrystal arrived at Kunduz with a Washington
Post reporter. When the Germans objected, McChrystal said the journalist
was just collecting background material for a book. But on Sept. 6 the Post printed a story blaming the whole
thing on the Germans and using quotes from the meeting.
German commanders angrily accused the U.S. of “deliberately leaking misinformation.”
The French and the British piled on next. The bombing was “a
big mistake,” said French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, and British
Foreign Minister David Millband called for an “urgent investigation.”
Afghan President Harmid Karzai blasted the attack as a
“major error,” adding that McChrystal had apologized and said that he had not
“given the order to attack.”
The underlying resentment among the NATO allies is beginning
to surface. When Labor MP Eric Joyce recently resigned from the cabinet because
he could no longer support the war, he leveled a broadside at other NATO
countries. “For many, Britain fights, Germany pays, France calculates, Italy
avoids.”
Even some in the U.S. have begun to rail at what they see as
a lack of commitment by NATO. U.S. Rep John Murtha, the powerful Democratic
chair of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, told The Cable that while “The American
people are supporting this [the war]” the Europeans are not. “The Europeans are
not doing a damn thing.”
As of Sept. 17, the U.S. had lost 830 solders in
Afghanistan, Britain 216, Canada 130, Germany 38, France 31, Denmark 27, Spain
25, Italy 21, and the Netherlands 21. The overall allied losses in the war are
1403.
Deaths among Afghan civilians, according the United Nations,
have risen 24 percent over last year, one third of them from air strikes.
The allied gang up was a shock to the Germans, who have long
touted their expertise in Afghanistan and sharply criticized other NATO nations
for being indifferent to civilian casualties. “German bashing” was suddenly in
vogue. As one diplomat told Der Spiegel,
it was “Schadenfreude against the eternal know-it-alls.”
The massacre at Kunduz has suddenly brought the war home to
the Germans. The parties that collaborated in sending the troops—the
Green Party, the CDU and the SDP—have long tried to keep Afghanistan off
the radar screen. Jung won’t use the word “krieg” (war), Merkel has yet to
attend a soldier’s funeral, and Steinmeier has suddenly embraced a “10 step
program for Afghanistan,” as if a solution in that war-torn country was akin to
drying out at a health spa.
Following the attack, the Left Party, the only party that
opposes the war, called for a major anti-war protest at the Brandenburg Gate.
In the end, Kunduz may be the tipping point for NATO, the
incident that shattered the myth that Afghanistan was about digging wells,
building schools and bringing peace.
“Simple villagers were killed. They were not Taliban,” Dr.
Saft Sidique of Kunduz Hospital said. “The German air strike has changed
everything. The sympathy for the Germans is gone. Would it be any different for
you if your homeland was bombed?”
It’s an old saying that there is no better recruiting
sergeant than an air strike, a truism on display at a meeting of the Kunduz
provincial government shortly after the attack. A number of people there
praised the air strike, but at the end of the gathering Maulawi Ebadullah Ahadi
of Chahar Dara, a town where the Taliban rule, raised his hand: “Brothers, each
of those killed has a hundred relatives who will then fight against the
government. Bombs sow the seeds of hate.” 