German military pushes to overturn post-war constraints

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After Obama’s Afghanistan speech
German military pushes to overturn post-war constraints
By Peter Schwarz
3 December 2009

The escalation of the war in Afghanistan has plunged the second
government of Angela Merkel (CDU, Christian Democratic Union) into a
serious crisis. Just four weeks after taking office, the
highest-ranking general of the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces), a senior
civil servant and the country’s former defence minister have been
forced to go.

As always with such crises, one must differentiate between the
immediate trigger and the deeper causes. The immediate trigger was the
cover-up of the Kunduz massacre, the bloodiest military action
involving German soldiers since the end of the Second World War. The
deeper causes lie in the fundamental changes undertaken in the
Bundeswehr: After over six decades as a nominally defensive force,
Germany’s military is once again claiming the right to kill the
inhabitants of other countries with impunity.

In view of Germany’s history, such a change does not happen without
creating tensions and upheavals. The overwhelming majority of the
population still opposes German soldiers being sent on war missions.
Following the terrible crimes of Hitler’s Wehrmacht (armed forces),
Germany maintained no army of its own in the first ten years following
the war. In 1955, at the highpoint of the Cold War, the German
government created the Bundeswehr, over the bitter opposition of the
population. Its task remained limited to the defense of NATO
territory; it was practically never involved in any war missions.

That changed with German reunification and the collapse of the Soviet
Union. Germany regained its full sovereignty, and the ruling elite
looked for ways to pursue its foreign policy interests, including by
military means. After several smaller missions under the auspices of
the UN, the Social Democratic Party (SPD)-Green Party coalition in
Berlin finally opened the way for the Bundeswehr’s first large-scale
war engagement: participation in the Kosovo war. This was a war
disputed in international law, in the course of which Serbia came
under substantial bombardment. Three years later in 2002, the
SPD-Green government dispatched the Bundeswehr to Afghanistan.

Because of continuing opposition to the use of the Bundeswehr in war
situations, this deployment was presented as a peace mission or
reconstruction operation. The Bundeswehr, according to the official
propaganda, is not engaged in a war and is also not an army of
occupation; rather, it is securing peace, stabilizing the country and
thereby creating the necessary conditions for the construction of
civil society and the country’s infrastructure.

However, this fiction can no longer be maintained. The war in
Afghanistan has continued to escalate over the past months, and with
the decision of President Obama to increase the number of American
troops by a further 30,000 to 100,000, it has taken on a scale similar
to that of the Vietnam War.

The goal of this war is not to democratize the country or the destroy
Al Qaeda, but to defend the hegemony of the imperialist Western powers
in oil-rich central Asia. The new German defense minister,
Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, expressed this openly in his inaugural
visit to Washington, when he said, one must bid farewell to the
“romantic idea of the democratization of the entire country according
to the Western model”.

This development has led to considerable tensions in the Bundeswehr.
It is participating in a brutal war of occupation, in which soldiers
daily risk their lives and the tally of civilian victims grows.
Despite this, the government is clinging firmly to its previous
propaganda that Afghanistan is purely a security and policing mission.

In the eyes of the military, this not only robs the Bundeswehr of
urgently needed public acknowledgment, it also results in German
troops being subjected to civilian law. If they kill Afghan civilians,
they face investigation by German public prosecutors. While American
and British elite troops routinely kill alleged Taliban forces and
destroy entire settlements with remote-controlled missiles, German
soldiers must reckon with criminal investigations if they do the same.

It was in this situation that the massacre of Kunduz occurred.

It is still unclear what induced Bundeswehr Colonel Georg Klein to
request an air strike on two kidnapped petrol tankers on September 4,
which according to NATO sources killed up to 142 victims, including
numerous civilians. What is certain is that the official presentation
of the event is riddled with unexplained contradictions.

For example, it is still claimed that Klein called for the air attack
without consulting his superiors. That explanation lacks any
credibility, if one considers that six hours elapsed between the
hijacking of the two trucks and their destruction, during which they
were under constant observation, were a considerable distance away
from the German base and were bogged down in a sand bank—thus
obviously presenting no direct danger to the German forces.

In the meantime, it is clear that Klein directly violated several of
NATO’s basic rules of engagement and misled the pilots of the American
fighter-bombers that dropped the deadly munitions. There was neither
an acute threat nor any other direct enemy contact, without which
Klein had no authority to unilaterally issue the instruction for the
air strike. Der Spiegel, which evaluated the official investigation
report, arrived at the conclusion: “Whoever reads the ISAF report
carefully gains the impression that Klein wanted to kill.”

The entire German government reacted to the Kunduz massacre by
systematically hiding the truth and deceiving the public. For days,
Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung denied that there had been civilian
casualties. In parliament, Chancellor Merkel attacked all those who
would “prejudge” the Bundeswehr. And one month later, Jung’s
successor, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, continued to defend the air
strike as militarily necessary.

In the end, the cover-up attempt failed because powerful forces within
the military opposed this course of action. Twelve hours after the
bombing, the American ISAF commander General Stanley McChrystal
visited the scene in person and criticized the actions of Klein. The
“Initial Action Team” that accompanied him came to the conclusion that
there was a “very great probability of civilian victims”. This
information was also reported in the media, which supplied additional
proof of the number of civilian victims.

With the German government finding itself increasingly boxed in,
Bild-Zeitung published internal Bundeswehr reports and a video of the
air strike from one of the combat aircraft involved. They exposed the
government’s lies and led to the resignation of general-inspector
Wolfgang Schneiderhan, State Secretary Peter Wichert and the former
Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung, who in the meantime was a minister
in the department of labour.

It is not clear who passed on the incriminating material to
Bild-Zeitung. It could only have originated from within military
circles. According to Der Spiegel, there are rumors in the defence
ministry that it came from those close to Jung’s successor Guttenberg,
in order to get rid of unpopular figures in the ministry of defence.
Although Guttenberg participated in the cover-up of the massacre, he
has positioned himself as the mouthpiece of the military and strives
to provide them with the necessary legal and political room for
maneuver to conduct their international war missions.

In any case, the leading German authorities are now compelled to adopt
a clear position. The public prosecutor’s office in Potsdam has handed
over its case files on Colonel Klein to the Federal Prosecutor’s
Office. Experts expect that this will be dealt with as a matter of
international criminal law, which could have far reaching
consequences. Klein could only be punished if he had deliberately
committed a war crime—of which the Federal Prosecutor’s Office will
surely not accuse him. On the other hand, killing people in
Afghanistan within the context of the ISAF mission would be legal.

The relevant penal code originates from 2002. It was enacted by the
SPD-Green Party government shortly after the beginning of the
Afghanistan war. Publicly, it was presented as a means by which war
crimes and crimes against humanity could be pursued even if they were
committed by non-Germans outside Germany. However, it also contains
clauses regulating the responsibility of military commanders.

If Colonel Klein is acquitted based on these sections of the penal
code, or if proceedings against him are halted, this would create a
precedent. The Bundeswehr would have been given a charter to kill as
part of their foreign missions, without having to face any legal
investigations. This is something which the military has been
demanding a long time. They demand “legal security”, which includes
the Afghanistan operation being called by its proper name— a war. The
new defence minister, Guttenberg, supported this demand on the day he
was inaugurated by ditching the previous phraseology and describing
the mission in Afghanistan as “armed conflict” and a
“non-international war”.

The parliamentary defence committee, which convened Wednesday as a
committee of inquiry, is also pursuing the goal of backing the
Bundeswehr. The object of its investigation is not the events in
Kunduz but the “communication breakdown” in the ministry of defense,
which should be avoided in future. By holding the inquiry under the
auspices of the defence committee, its deliberations can be held in
secret, to avoid too much information reaching the light of day. Its
members are regularly briefed about current events and are obliged to
uphold strict rules of secrecy—and to a certain extent are
investigating themselves.

Moreover, all the Bundestag parties are deeply implicated in the
Afghanistan war: the SPD and the Greens sent the Bundeswehr to
Afghanistan; the Christian Democrats and the Free Democratic Party
want to increase the level of Germany’s troop commitment; and the Left
Party calls for a “departure strategy”, but only after peace is
brought to the country and the situation is under control.

If as a result of the Kunduz massacre the Bundeswehr is given a
charter to kill, this would have far-reaching consequences. Not only
would it be able to act more ruthlessly against the insurgents in
Afghanistan, resulting in more civilian victims, it could also
participate more freely in the deliberate killings that are a hallmark
of modern colonial wars.

Above all, the American, Israeli and British armies have for a long
time deliberately liquidated those accused of being terrorism
suspects. Dubious intelligence or a denunciation suffices to carry out
a death sentence, without the accused ever needing to face a public
prosecutor or a judge. The sentence is usually carried out by
remote-controlled missiles. Debates have taken place on an
international level for years concerning the legal gray area in which
these slayings occur.

The participation of German soldiers in such actions has far reaching
historical implications. During the “vernichtungskrieg” (war of
extermination) on the Eastern Front, Hitler’s armed forces committed
war crimes on an almost unimaginable scale. Since then, the German
military has had its hands bound. The removal of such fetters has
dangerous consequences for the international and German working class.

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/afgh-d03.shtml

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