20200315 Wehrbeauftragter Barthel im Interview

An "international chaos has been unleashed over Afghanistan"

said Klaus Barthel, the Federal Armed Forces Commissioner for the Armed Forces, in the 12.22 program on Radio Berlin Brandenburg yesterday. He is referring to the 19-year deployment of a coalition of the willing, first as ISAF Mission and now for several years as Mission Resolute Support. We would rather speak of an intervention prohibited by international law.

Also the deployment of all sorts of aid organisations, which may not have squandered a trillion, but have nevertheless squandered a few hundred million in the Afghan sand by importing Western habits and commodities for expensive money to serve the suspected interests and needs of the population.

For the Bundeswehr, he also sees the withdrawal after the Taliban's treaty with the USA as logical. And he calls for an open stocktaking of this longest deployment of the Bundeswehr abroad in the Bundeswehr and in politics. Unfortunately, he was not asked why the Bundestag agreed to an extension of the unsuccessful mission this week. This can be neither in the interest of the soldiers nor of the taxpayer!

He sees the mission in Afghanistan "only as moderately successful" and in Mali he sees a similar "chaos". Even more devastating would have been the wars in Iraq and Libya, in which the Bundeswehr had fortunately not been involved. Isn't it his job as a military commissioner to protect the soldiers (and the local population) from this? Besides, the situation in Afghanistan with now 3 forces willing to govern and 2 presidents is not better than in Libya with 2 governments and various militias.

56 Bundeswehr soldiers have died in Afghanistan since 2002 - making the mission the most loss-making in the history of the troops - and 170 Bundeswehr soldiers returned home with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 2017, according to the Bundeswehr Medical Service. In 2016 there were five more cases. Klaus Barthel says in the Ärztezeitung that "PTSD is now widely regarded as a physical wound".

On the subject: Is there a "shadow army" in the Bundeswehr?

In several annual reports, the military commissioner had addressed right-wing extremist tendencies in the Bundeswehr, but could not give any background and figures due to lack of insight. He had, however, called on the Military Counter-Intelligence Service (MAD) to do research into this. This is what the MAD did last year - much too late. The MAD was able to identify over 500 members of the Bundeswehr as right-wing extremist observation cases and almost 50 were dismissed from service in 2019 because of right-wing extremist activities.

IIs this only the tip of the iceberg? We cannot judge that from the outside. But the dismissal of a whistleblower from the Bundeswehr, who had filed charges against fellow right-wing extremist fighters, makes us pause for thought. Whistleblowers must be protected!

ndr.de: "Patrick J. was with the paratroopers. Via the social media he came across several extreme right-wing soldiers and reported them to the MAD. Apparently they were not dismissed." Those who are reported can continue to serve at gunpoint and hope for their pensions...

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