BERLIN, Feb. 4 (UPI) -- Germany's refusal -- despite a direct U.S. request from Defense Secretary Robert Gates -- to send additional troops into southern Afghanistan to help NATO battle Taliban is a mistake, experts say.
"I think this is a huge mistake," Jan Techau, a foreign policy expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations, a Berlin-based think tank, Friday told United Press International in a telephone interview. "Our international partners are losing their patience with us and this renewed rejection will hurt Germany politically."
On Friday, Defense Minister Franz Jung said Germany won't be sending more troops to Afghanistan.
"We need to keep our point of focus in northern Afghanistan," Jung said at a news conference called on short notice. "We will continue to do our part as foreseen by the parliamentary mandate. … I will make clear to (Gates) where our engagement is."
Gates had sent Jung an "unusually stern" eight-page letter calling for additional German soldiers and military equipment, such as helicopters, German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported. Gates informed his German counterpart that Washington would send an additional 3,200 troops into Afghanistan (some 26,000 U.S. soldiers are already on the ground). After seven months, Gates wrote Jung, Germany and other NATO members would have to replace those troops.
Canada also pressured European nations to do more in Afghanistan: Either European NATO members would live up to their alliance responsibilities and send 1,000 troops and helicopters, or Canada in 2009 will pull out completely its 2,500 soldiers from Afghanistan.
France apparently received a similar letter, and also refused.
"The letter came as a surprise to us," Ulrich Wilhelm, Chancellor Angela Merkel's chief spokesman, told a regular news conference Friday in Berlin. "The government has made clear that the existing mandate provides the basis for our engagement."
That mandate confines German troops to reconstruction efforts in the relatively peaceful northern provinces. What irks Gates and his NATO colleagues most is the German unwillingness to send troops to join the fighting in the volatile southern and eastern provinces of the country. There, the International Security Assistance Force and the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom engage in bloody conflicts with Taliban rebels.
Over the weekend the top NATO official increased the pressure on Germany. NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the job Germany was doing in the northern provinces was exemplary. "We could use more of that elsewhere in Afghanistan," he told Sunday's Bild newspaper.
Germany got a prominent backing recently when Afghan President Hamid Karzai in an interview with German newspaper Die Welt said sending more troops to his country was not as important as training Afghanistan's police and military, a task the Germans said they want to intensify over the coming months.
"More than anything else, we need help to rebuild our human capital and our institutions our army, our police force, our administrative structure, our judiciary and so on," Karzai said.
The German government's rejection to send more troops nevertheless worries experts.
Techau, of the German Council on Foreign Relations, said the rejection is a potentially "big crisis" in the trans-Atlantic alliance, which has flourished since Merkel took office in late 2005. Yet her government's decision (and of course Merkel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier back the refusal to send more troops) was one that has its roots in Germany's sometimes over-ideological domestic political debate.
For decades, Germany has stayed away from military missions; the NATO bombing campaign in the Balkans in 1998-1999 was the first German fighting engagement since World War II.
The mostly pacifist German public is not ready to accept casualties and would punish any government sending German soldiers into casualty-heavy fighting. That's why politicians in Germany have shied away from opening the debate on engagements abroad that guarantee security at home. Moreover, Germany has presented the Afghanistan mission as a purely reconstruction and peacekeeping engagement, leaving out completely its military aspects. This is now getting back at the German government, Techau said.
"One has missed to communicate that the Afghanistan conflict is a war and that vital German security interests are at stake," he told UPI.
And indeed, the situation is anything but calm on the ground.
Earlier this week former NATO commander Gen. James Jones warned that Afghanistan might become a "failed state" because there were "too few military forces and insufficient economic aid."
Berlin will likely agree to another NATO request that came earlier this month. Germany has been asked to deploy a unit of 250 battle soldiers as part of a rapid-response force. The Germans are to replace a 350-strong Norwegian combat unit stationed in the northern provinces of Afghanistan; the Scandinavians are leaving in July. But the heat is on now, observers say. NATO defense ministers will meet in Vilnius, Lithuania, next week and discuss a possible troop boost to the 42,000 already on the ground. Germany will have to withstand some significant criticism from its North American allies during that meeting, and the same will be true for a NATO summit in April in Bucharest, Romania.
