Friday, 4 December 2009President Obama’s plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan is meeting with mixed responses in Germany. The German parliament decided to extend the German deployment yesterday evening - limited to 4,500 soldiers, and public support for the Afghanistan mission is decreasing rapidly.
Only 27 percent of Germans still support the troop deployment in Afghanistan according to a poll by the German broadcast station ARD. One reason for the loss of confidence is the scandal surrounding the Kunduz airstrike on 4 September 2009. The U.S. Air force complied with the German request to strike two fuel tankers captured by Taliban forces. Reports listed at least 20 civilians killed shortly after the airstrike, but the German defense minister, Franz Josef Jung, repeatedly denied civilian deaths. His position and a failed communication policy pushed Jung to resign as Germany’s Minister of Labor and Social Affairs which he became after federal elections on 27 November 2009.
The new defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, switched his assessment about the airstrike. Guttenberg justified the airstrike as "appropriate in military terms� in early November. "In retrospect and with regret, I would like to correct my assessment in light of all documents and from an objective perspective today as not militarily appropriate," Guttenberg said on Thursday evening at the German Bundestag.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said to wait on any decision in regards to further troop deployment until the conference on Afghanistan at the end of January 2010. It is assumed that Germany will not send more than 2,000 new soldiers to Afghanistan.
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Friday, 4 December 2009
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