From Munich to Kabul

Get out of Afghanistan? I was undecided: if NATO abandons Afghanistan, people will again be stoned to death and human rights won’t be worth a damn. And, contrary to popular opinion, value systems and cultures can be exported using completely military means as the Roman Empire, Napoleon, Spain, England and the United States have proven hundreds of times. On the other hand, there are many countries where it didn’t work, the direction it seems to now be headed in Afghanistan; but why just there? It has to do with geopolitical interests; all of humanism is to some extent hypocrisy. Didn’t the Roman Empire have its own interests? I was really undecided.

Then on September 8th, twenty-five German intellectuals (among them Martin Walser and Richard David Precht) published an appeal that called for a withdrawal of German troops from Afghanistan. Precht maintained that Germany should avoid becoming a target of terrorism. Earlier in July, Walser wrote, “We will cease to be a target of terrorists as soon as we stop all our military engagement.” One week later, a man in the Munich subway was beaten to death when he tried to help some children. A hero. Germany was flooded with articles and talk shows that praised civil courage, encouraged strength and heavier penalties and damned the indifference of our people.

Am I the only one who sees a connection between Munich and Kabul? If we never display any civil courage in our subways and flee at every disturbance, young gangs will stop targeting innocent people there? Almost everybody in Germany says we dare not avert our eyes to such acts. But in Afghanistan, we should not only avert our eyes when women are stoned to death, we should consider non-involvement a wise course of action as well?

And it’s even more complicated. In order to really accomplish anything in Afghanistan, we would have to quit aerial bombardment from safe altitudes, attacks that result in the deaths of hundreds of innocent civilians. We would have to totally occupy the country for many years, completely restructure its components, and create new elites and a completely different everyday culture, similar to what was done in Germany by Napoleon and the United States. That’s a fantasy. It would result in far too many lives; our lives, not Afghan lives. A modern democracy that claims to hold its citizens’ lives in the highest regard, a sentiment that I fully support, can’t realistically do that. We have to get out of Afghanistan sooner or later because the logic of our system demands it. We’ve taken our own human rights so much for granted that human rights for others mean nothing to us. I’m someone’s neighbor, whether in Kabul or in the Munich subway.