For God’s Sake!

Last January, I wrote a column entitled “Dear German Soldier.” I wrote the column as a farewell letter on the occasion of the departure of a good friend who was being sent to serve in the Afghanistan war. I called it a “war” back then, although that term has just recently become acceptable in reference to the event, and I asked myself at the time, “Why are German soldiers stationed in Afghanistan?”

At the burial ceremony last week for those German soldiers killed on Good Friday, there was much talk of heroes and of dying for one’s country. It will be the same for the four killed on Thursday. I can’t help it: I’m trembling with embarrassment. Nobody over there is fighting for our freedoms. That’s a big, bare-faced lie. The war isn’t being fought against the Taliban, it’s being fought against the Afghans, and we only hope to kill as many Taliban as possible in the process. Because our chancellor and our defense minister haven’t yet had enough of death and dying, they’ve promised our soldiers better weapons. They just buried three soldiers and say the lesson learned is that they need better weapons?

It’s said our soldiers should inspire confidence among the Afghan people. That’s nonsense, too. They walk through the marketplaces and can’t speak a single word of Dari or Pashto. How are they supposed to communicate? In a Phoenix network documentary about our engagement there, someone says, “We communicate with gestures.” If I were an Afghan woman, I’d be messing my underclothes if I were confronted by a huge soldier wearing dark sunglasses with the muzzle of his rifle pointed in the general direction of my heart as he tried to gain my confidence with gestures.

Germany meticulously counts each and every one of its fallen soldiers. But since issuance of the Afghan mandate in 2001, the government has not kept statistics on the number of civilians killed or wounded. We wage war and just count the number of our fallen soldiers! We don’t count civilian victims! Officially, there are no dead Afghan civilians! Where are the boundaries of proportionality? The pompous argument that we’re preserving our liberties by taking the lives of others is rotten at its core.

For years, German journalists have been flying to Afghanistan and informing us what our defense officials talk about between the time they land and the time they visit with the troops. This new interface with the press is called “embedding,” but one could just as well call it hostage taking. The military decides what the journalist gets to hear and see. That kind of control fulfills the primary criteria for properly calling it propaganda.

We can all travel to Afghanistan, but the reverse is nearly impossible. In Germany, 408 Afghans are currently languishing in prison-like conditions while they wait for decisions on their status as asylum-seekers. The chance that one who has a history of getting into fights will succeed is remote, whereas it ought to be enough to say, “We’re here because you’re waging your war in our country.” But that’s another consequence of lying about war.

If I were an Afghan asylum-seeker, I would be disgusted and weary. I only have one life, and men are marching through that while spreading fear and horror. If it’s not the Taliban, it’s foreign soldiers from all over the world. And after I’ve made it through all that, I now have to face the German bureaucracy. For God’s sake!