"The remarks reflect calls by Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle and some others to reclassify the German mission in Afghanistan as 'armed conflict.' So far, German military forces have been subjected to the civil penal code, given their participation in training Afghan police and soldiers and in reconstruction activities." [22]
Reclassifying Germany's - unequivocal and incontrovertible - combat mission in Afghanistan as war in place of the previous designations of peacekeeping and reconstruction would allow for a relaxation of legal and other constraints on its troops, so-called combat caveats, so that massacres like that in Kunduz last September will be more likely to be repeated and less likely to be prosecuted.
Germany's military role in NATO's first Asian war is of special significance as the May 8th (May 9th in much of Eastern Europe) 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe approaches.
When the leaders of the Big Three allied powers - Britain, the Soviet Union and the U.S. - met in Yalta and Potsdam in 1945 to discuss what a post-war Europe would look like, particular emphasis was placed on building a new legal and security structure that would prevent the possibility of the horrors of the Second World War ever again being inflicted on the continent and the world.
The nation that had ignited the deadliest war in human history - Germany with its invasions of Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1941 - was to be demilitarized. At the time many in the world hoped the model might be extended to all of Europe and to the rest of the world.
That wish was dashed with the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949 and the inclusion of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) into the military bloc six years afterward.
Germany would violate the post-World War II prohibition against engaging in armed conflicts by supplying Luftwaffe warplanes for NATO's 78-day air war against Yugoslavia in 1999 and then by deploying troops for what has now become a full-fledged combat role in Afghanistan. German forces have been appointed to lead fellow NATO nations' troops in the upcoming large-scale military offensive in Kunduz province.
On May 9th troops from the other Second World War allied powers in the European theater - the U.S., Britain and France - are for the first time to March in the Victory Day parade in the Russian capital.
There are different ways to commemorate the end of the world's bloodiest war.
Britain's Sunday Telegraph ran a feature on April 4th titled "Luftwaffe and RAF join forces in Afghanistan," which celebrated the fact that "Sixty-five years after the end of the Second World War" a "Luftwaffe navigator has flown into combat in the same plane as an RAF pilot for the very first time."
That the British Royal Air Force and its German opposite number would not only forget dogfights over the English channel and bombing raids over the continent in the early 1940s but join ranks in combat missions over an unoffending nation and its people in faraway South Asia seemed a cause for approbation to the major British daily, which detailed that "the [German] navigator climbed into a Tornado GR4 ground attack aircraft at Kandahar airbase in southern Afghanistan to provide air support for troops in Helmand province." The British Tornado GR4 multirole fighter, equipped for Storm Shadow and Brimstone missiles, earlier saw action in Iraq.
In fact the Tornado combat plane jointly flown by a German and a British pilot in Afghanistan "was armed with 500lb Paveway air-to-ground bombs, Brimstone missiles and a 27mm cannon." [23]
On May 8th and 9th when the world remembers the end of a conflict that accounted for the largest-ever loss of human life, two distinct, exclusive and even opposite interpretations will be offered on the events of 65 years ago.
One is that humanity must never allow the use of war to achieve political, territorial and economic objectives or in the name of redressing past grievances, all too often simply a matter of revenge.
The other is that the majority of the world's major military powers must intensify plans for international armed intervention based on global rapid deployment forces able to confront and attack any nation accused of posing a threat outside or inside its borders. "Preventatively."
The West's war in Afghanistan - with an ever-widening network of military bases and transportation infrastructure in Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia servicing it - is the era's most egregious example of the second strategy.
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