A former army chief accused the government on Sunday of failing its troops in Afghanistan as the political fallout continued from the bloodyGood Friday that saw the killing of both German and their allied Afghan soldiers.
Harald Kujat, who was the Bundeswehr's Chief of Staff from 2000 to 2002, blasted the government for having learnt nothing from the Kunduz air strike about reconnaissance and communication systems, and said the “friendly fire” killing of six Afghan soldiers could have been avoided.
There was a “lack of understanding about conditions on the ground and ignorance about the needs of the combat forces,” he told Welt am Sonntag newspaper.
He said the government had failed to learn the necessary lessons from the deadly Kunduz air strike last September, in which an attack ordered by a German commander killed dozens of civilians.
“Our soldiers are in this situation only because they – as so often – were not equipped with the necessary modern reconnaissance systems,'' he said of the accidental killing of the six Afghans on Friday.
“The Taliban know the terrain; they have the advantage. You have to somehow compensate for that”.
On Good Friday, three German soldiers were killed when their minesweeping convoy was ambushed by at least 100 Taliban insurgents. Just hours later, a German armoured patrol opened fire on two vehicles carrying allied Afghan soldiers after the vehicles failed to stop, killing six of them.
There has since been dispute about whether the vehicles were marked as military or civilian. ISAF commander, US General Stanley McChrystal, visited theGerman Kunduz base on Saturday in a clear demonstration that he took the friendly fire incident very seriously. Afghan authorities has criticised the German military, and a full investigation has been promised.
To better understand the methods of the enemy, the Bundewehr needed a more effective information and command system for combat, Kujat said. The essential components of this were already available – “only the ministerial bureaucracy is doing nothing,” he said.
He also branded the recent troop boost passed by the Bundestag as a “coalition compromise” that did not meet the strategic needs of the mission.
He predicted further bloodshed for the German army in northern Afghanistan, saying the air strike of last September had sapped their strength but they were now poised for a renewed assault.
“After that, they needed a certain time to set the scene. And now they’re doing just that”.
The dead Bundewehr soldiers, aged between 25 and 35, were from a paratrooper regiment from Lower Saxony.
“We all hoped that we would never have to experience these days,” said the ISAF commander for northern Afghanistan, Brigadier Frank Leidenberger at a memorialservice on Saturday. “The hope was suddenly shattered on April 2”.
Leidenberger also offered sympathy for the deaths of the Afghan soldiers and confirmed for the first time that it was six soldiers killed, not five as the Bundewehr had initially stated.
Developoment Minister Dirk Niebel, who extended his trip in Afghanistan to visit the troops in Kunduz, called for Germany as a whole to show greater support to its soldiers. After talking with the troops on Saturday, he told Bild am Sonntagnewspaper Friday's gun battle showed how deadly the situation was for German troops.
''They want more understanding that they sometimes, even preventatively, have to defend themselves. And they don’t understand it when they have to justify themselves for this to the German public or even be pursued for prosecution”.
The soldiers at the Kunduz base were due on Sunday to farewell the bodies of their comrades killed on Friday in the fiercest gun battle yet seen between Germans and Taliban insurgents. The three soldiers’ remains were to flown back to Germany on the Airbus that Niebel had been using to visit civil reconstruction projects in the area.
The four seriously wounded German soldiers were flown to Germany on Saturday. They landed at the Cologne-Bonn airport and were transferred immediately to a military hospital at Koblenz.
DPA
The Local | Germany
