Developments on the Afghan battlefield brutally expose a damning truth: America's longest war, in which NATO also participated at great expense, has failed.
Over the weekend, the Taliban succeeded in capturing several provincial capitals in northern Afghanistan. These included Kunduz, the capital city of the eponymous province where the Bundeswehr, or German armed forces, were in charge of security for many years.
Taliban as victors
Since it has become clear that the United States and its NATO partners are withdrawing armed forces from Afghanistan unconditionally, the Taliban feel like winners and are behaving as such. Since then, the militant Islamist group has begun multiple offensives against the Western-backed Afghan government.
Against this backdrop, the number of civilian casualties continues to rise dramatically. According to data from the United Nations, at least 244,000 people have been internally displaced since the beginning of May. Many are seeking safety in the capital, Kabul. Others are determined to reach Europe via neighboring Pakistan and Iran.
The Afghan civil war, unresolved for four decades, has flared up afresh. At its core is the question of whether Afghanistan will become a fundamentalist theocracy or remain an Islamic republic. But how could it possibly have come to this?
The question of guilt
The US-led coalition failed to negotiate with the Taliban at their weakest point after the regime collapsed in late 2001. Western democracies arrogantly ignored the roots of the Afghan conflict and based their military and political actions solely on domestic factors.
In the US, the initial focus was on revenge for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent hunt for their mastermind, Osama bin Laden. In Germany, the intention of the foreign mission was to stand in solidarity with its most important ally and rebuild an impoverished, isolated country. This was the best way to sell it to the voting population, in any case.
And the rest is history. The Taliban found new strength in the Pakistan and Afghanistan border region. The Western alliance entered into dubious partnerships with brutal warlords. The "war against terror" reached into Afghan villages. It also facilitated massive corruption and abuse of power within Afghanistan's political elite.
Then the invasion of Iraq distracted the coalition — and created new terror, leading to the rise of the self-proclaimed "Islamic State."
The years passed. A vision for a clear exit scenario, with clear goals, never once appeared. The US military dominated politics and diplomacy in the country throughout this time.
Unconditional withdrawal
Eventually it was former US President Donald Trump, of all people, who opened formal negotiations with the Taliban, again for domestic political reasons. He did not involve the Afghan government and largely sidelined America's NATO partners.
His successor, Joe Biden, then cemented the unconditional withdrawal of foreign troops. The reason given was that Afghanistan no longer posed an international terrorist threat. Only time will tell whether this assessment turns out to be true.
A return of NATO troops to the Afghan battlefield seems out of the question. What the US and its allies can do right now is exert maximum political and financial pressure on the Taliban. Inevitably, that would also mean working with difficult countries like Pakistan, Iran, China, and Russia to protect Afghan civilians.
It must be clear to everyone that the Taliban's rapid advance cannot be explained without a helping hand from Pakistan.
Moral responsibility
And Germany? Germany has a moral duty to provide unbureaucratic and rapid assistance to people who have worked with German forces and civilian organizations. Many could be targeted by the Taliban as suspected traitors. Executions are already a reality.
Yet the German government still shies away from simply flying out local staff and their families. This is shameful. It is equally shameful that a democratic and constitutional country like Germany continues to persist in deporting rejected asylum seekers to Afghanistan. Such deportations must be halted.
For almost 20 years, soldiers of the Bundeswehr have fulfilled the political mandate of the German parliament in Afghanistan. So now, it's time for the truth: Above all, government and parliament owe it to them and to the civilian victims in Afghanistan to conduct a ruthless and independent review of Germany's most expensive and bloodiest foreign mission to date.
Otherwise, further missions — such as the ongoing deployment to Mali — may be doomed to suffer the same miserable fate.