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GERMANY: Conflict Builds Up With Obama Over Afghanistan

Julio Godoy

BERLIN, Jun 4 2009 (IPS) - When U.S. President Barack Obama visits Germany this Thursday and Friday, he is likely to get a reception as warm as the demonstration of sympathy he enjoyed in July last year. And yet, Obama's high standing among Germans is likely to fall if he asks the German government to send more military personnel to Afghanistan.

In July 2007, hundreds of thousands of Germans attended Obama's open-air speech in Berlin – when he was running to represent the U.S. Democratic Party at the presidential elections.

That kind of support continues. According to an opinion poll conducted in April and May among about 1,000 adults by the group World Public Opinion, 89 percent Germans said they have confidence in Obama "doing the right thing in world affairs."

But, according to the poll, this confidence falls over U.S. military policies in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

WPO is a research group managed by the Programme on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland in the U.S. The group aims "to give voice to public opinion around the world on international issues."

The poll finds that more than half of Germans (54 percent) disapprove of the recent increase of U.S. troops in Afghanistan ordered by Obama's government. Two-thirds think "the U.S. uses the threat of military force to gain advantage."

This rejection is likely to pile on if, as expected, Obama asks Germany to increase its military participation in the war against the Taliban. Obama had said last July that Germany would need to increase its contribution in Afghanistan to improve the mission's chances of success.

Several opinion polls carried out since the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 ousted the Taliban show that two-thirds of Germans consistently reject the war in Afghanistan, and want immediate withdrawal of German soldiers stationed there.

The WPO poll shows that a majority of Germans (55 percent) think "most people in Afghanistan want NATO forces to leave now." Among those Germans who hold this belief, 74 percent want the mission ended.

Some 4,000 German soldiers are stationed in Afghanistan. These include about 100 special forces soldiers participating in the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom in southern Afghanistan. About 3,500 soldiers are with the UN International Security Assistance Force (ISAR) in the north to protect development workers.

Besides, Germany has contributed six Tornado reconnaissance aircraft. In the eight years of military presence in Afghanistan, 30 German soldiers have been killed.

Expert views are in line with public opinion. Five leading German institutions on conflict and peace studies said in a joint report released May 26 that the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan is "unwinnable". This study was part of the 2009 edition of the German Peace Report coordinated by the Institute for Development and Peace (INEF, after its German name) at the University of Duisburg, 300 kilometres south of Berlin.

The report, titled 'Winning People instead of Waging Wars', says "military power and development assistance are strategically unimportant in a civil war. They can only contribute to peace if they support an administrative set- up and legal order respected by the people."

Michael Brzoska, director of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, and co-author of the study, told IPS that Germany, "instead of following the U.S. new strategy" (the so-called "surge", of substantially increasing the number of soldiers deployed in Afghanistan) should come up with a new policy aimed at creating legitimate civil structures.

Brzoska says the security situation has worsened dramatically since 2004. "Between 2004 and 2008, the number of civil victims of the war and of security personnel killed increased drastically," he says. "In this period, the number of bomb attacks grew by ten, and between 2007 and 2008, the Taliban could increase their attacks by almost 50 percent."

Brzoska says this increasing violence is only a symptom of the real Afghan problem, which is "the backslashes in the political development and the deficits of the country's state institutions."

It is people loyalty towards a political project that determines the outcome of war, not military decisions, Brzoska says. Military missions, he says, can in fact erode such loyalty if they provoke a high number of civil casualties or support an unpopular regime.