The NATO airstrike in Afghanistan's Kunduz Province last week left over 100 dead -- many of them civilians. But as the Washington Post's Pamela Constable notes, the Afghan reaction to this latest mass casualty incident has been remarkably muted.
In contrast to earlier incidents -- like the Azizabad strike in western Herat Province last year, "popular and official reaction to the lethal airstrike has been far more tolerant," Constable writes. "There have been no angry demonstrations against Western occupiers, and no blistering condemnation by President Hamid Karzai or local authorities. So far, not even the families of the dead have come forward to protest."
The *Post'*s Rajiv Chandrasekaran, accompanying International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal on his investigation, offered a must-read account of the intel that led the German commander in Kunduz to order the lethal strike: a grainy video feed, and a phone call from a lone informant on the ground. But in a meeting with Afghan officials, the head of the local provincial council took McChrystal's team to task -- not for the casualties, but for the passive approach of the German-led contingent in Kunduz, where security has been on a downward spiral.
Where the incident has prompted some real soul-searching, however, has been in Germany. The Bundeswehr presence in Afghanistan has been sold to Germany's pacifist-leaning public as a peacekeeping and humanitarian mission, not as a counterinsurgency; prosecutors in Potsdam are now weighing whether charges should be brought against the commander. Unfairly or not, Germans troops in Afghanistan are known for putting on weight and drinking heroic amounts of beer, not fighting Taliban. And while Berlin recently changed rules of engagement to allow pre-emptive use of force, their posture remains primarily defensive.
Those tendencies has been apparent for a long time. I visited the Kunduz contingent not long after it was established in 2004. Revisting one of my dispatches from that fall, I'm struck by the parallels with the situation today. The Germans had taken a passive approach to security: During a riot in the town of Faizabad, they sat back and watched while a crowd ransacked foreign aid offices. The attitude was underscored to me by Lt. Col. Thomas Scheibe, who told me that the Germans were not there to provide basic security in Kunduz -- that was a job for the police.* "We are part of ISAF," Scheibe told me. "Security assistance* force." From that dispatch:
Violence has worsened considerably in the past few years. Counterinsurgency may mean weighing the use of force extremely carefully. But minimal use of force should not be confused with an emphasis on self-protection.
[PHOTO: NATO]
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