A year after the Taliban took power, thousands of German helpers are still stuck in mortal danger in the Hindu Kush. They should finally be flown out.
Afghans in August 2021 in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. From here they continued to Germany. With thousands of other local workers, the Federal Republic is still responsible a year later.
Fatina Keilani, editor of the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” in Berlin.
You are reading an excerpt from the weekday newsletter “The Other View”, today by Fatina Keilani, editor of the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” in Germany. Subscribe to the newsletter for free. Not resident in Germany? Benefit here.
Make it worse is a nice word: someone with good intentions wants to make something better and ends up making it worse. The German government is about to improve the way it treats the so-called local forces from Afghanistan. First she has let down thousands of those whom she is actually obliged to help. Now the first voices from the government are calling for their other relatives to be rescued as well. It would be madness in terms of migration policy, not for the first time. But one after anonther.
The deployment in Afghanistan was the most intensive in the history of the Bundeswehr. German soldiers were stationed in the country for a total of 20 years; they were involved in several missions, first to stabilize the country and then to build state structures. During this time, they employed the said local staff – that is, Afghans who worked as interpreters or craftsmen, security guards or kitchen help for the Germans. After the withdrawal of American troops – announced by former US President Donald Trump in February 2020 and carried out in mid-2021 under his successor Joe Biden – things happened shockingly quickly: the Taliban overran one province after the other. This Monday marked the anniversary of their assumption of power in Kabul.
The horror at the airport
A year ago, thousands of Afghans rushed to the capital’s airport to escape from the tyrants. Terrible conditions ensued. The local staff were particularly at risk.
But instead of doing everything to bring the Afghans who had worked for the Federal Republic to safety, the German state went about its business first. The Foreign Office initially did not take the ambassador’s reports seriously in Kabul, and later several ministries discussed the issue of local staff at length. To this day, thousands of former helpers of the Germans in Afghanistan are waiting to flee. There are lists with their names, they have not yet been fully processed.
As the incumbent Social Democratic Interior Minister Nancy Faeser announced this weekend, Germany will not leave any former local Afghan workers behind in the country. She is working with Green Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on a “Federal Admissions Program in Afghanistan”. Luise Amtsberg, the government’s human rights commissioner and a party friend of Baerbock’s, seconded the demand not only to bring relatives of the local staff to Germany in the sense of the “nuclear family”. Amtsberg has been calling for a generous asylum policy for years; one can assume that her advance was agreed with the green cabinet members. The SPD domestic politician Helge Lindh made a similar statement.
Bundeswehr soldiers also warn
As desirable as it would be to save as many Afghans as possible from the Taliban, it is impossible in political practice. The cultural clashes would increase. It is not without reason that German soldiers who were deployed in Afghanistan express concerns about the people’s ability to integrate into the Western value system: the fact that there was no significant resistance to the Taliban is also due to the fact that the vast majority of Afghans support Sharia.
Not to mention the sheer number of people involved: even an Afghan nuclear family is many times larger than a European one; the country’s women have an average of 4.6 children. With a few thousand local employees, the extended family would quickly add up to a huge group of people entitled to enter the country – very few of whom could be integrated into the labor market. The German state, which is already struggling with the integration of millions of immigrants, would obviously overwhelm itself even more than it is doing today.
The right thing to do would be to focus on what is politically feasible: the former German local staff still living in Afghanistan have a right to prompt help because they have rendered outstanding service to their future host country. But the German state is not responsible for adult children or distant relatives. He is, and this is often forgotten in this country, primarily committed to his own population. And when it comes to protecting them – think of the flooding in the Ahr Valley, how the authorities are dealing with the corona pandemic or the upcoming energy crisis – then there is still a lot of room for improvement.