High time

In three years' time, the Afghans will once again be responsible for their state and its security. That, anyway, is what the Afghan government hopes, and what the international community is planning.

The plan is to be hashed out at the latest Afghanistan conference in Bonn, Germany, on December 5. The motto for the meeting is "responsible transition," and German Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere wants the final doubts over the plan to be expunged.

"We have agreed a strategy - a political and a military one - by which we will end the operation by the end of 2014," he said ahead of the conference. "That will also be our message to the Afghans - that is when they should take responsibility for security."

High time

Foreign forces have already trained around 130,000 Afghan police officers and 175,000 soldiers, a task that has become one of the central pillars of international aid. In parallel with these efforts, NATO troops, led by the US Army, have already started to withdraw. And the German Bundeswehr, at 5,000 troops the third-biggest NATO contingent, is set to start pulling out in 2012.

For German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, it's high time. "We've been in Afghanistan for 10 years, and we have to make sure it won't be another 10," he said. "That's why it's the German government's goal to withdraw all our troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014."

German soldiers will remain after that date too, to train Afghan troops. For the moment however, they are still fighting in the whole country, including Germany's area of jurisdiction in the north.

Too soon?

Bundeswehr correspondent Marco Seliger thinks the withdrawal plan is suspect. "We just let President Hamid Karzai pick the year 2014," the journalist, who has just published a book on Germany's Afghanistan mission, told Deutsche Welle. "Karzai believes the Afghan security forces will be able to secure the area by then, which won't be the case. The insurgency in Afghanistan is waiting on that date, and it has a lot of time."

Seliger also thinks the Afghan police is weak and the army could fall apart without the cohesion provided by international forces. In the years since the fall of the Taliban, the international community has learned the hard way that their expectations have often been too high.

Former Defence Minister Peter Struck was the first to say that Germany's security was being protected in the Hindu Kush. He still stands by the claim, but has developed a few caveats.

"We're a lot more experienced now, 10 years after the start of the mission," he said. "We know now that we naively believed we could build democratic structures in Afghanistan. We're light years from that today. The Karzai regime is a bitter, corrupt and corrupting disappointment."

Anger at Karzai

As a member of the opposition, Struck is allowed to say that, but the government is only allowed to think it, since they have to work with Karzai until the end of his tenure in 2014.

Too often, Karzai, a figure in whom so much hope was once invested, has promised more than he has delivered - aid money has disappeared, negotiations with the Taliban have stalled and the Afghan economy has failed to develop. Afghanistan is still in one of the bottom places on the United Nations Human Development Index.

Still, Karzai has hand-picked the delegation he will bring with him to Bonn, and he will hold the chair of the conference. This is meant to demonstrate that responsibility is gradually being transferred to the Afghans, but according the German government's Afghanistan commissioner Michael Steiner, many Afghans fear they will be left in the lurch once again.

"That is why it is objectively and psychologically so important to signal to the Afghans, 'We will stay with you,'" he said. "We must guarantee that we will remain engaged in the country after the withdrawal. That is the key point, and that must be the key message in Bonn."

Author: Nina Werkhäuser / bk
Editor: Rob Mudge