by Helga Zepp-LaRouche
Chairwoman, Solidarity Civil Rights Movement (BueSo)
Feb. 4, 2008

The refusal by Defense Minister Jung, and by the entire Grand Coalition, to accede to U.S. Secretary of Defense Gates' demand that the Bundeswehr deploy troops into southern Afghanistan, is the absolutely correct response. The fact of the matter is that under current conditions, the war in Afghanistan has already been lost. And the attempt now to pull Germany, France, and other European states more deeply into the Afghan quicksand, is nothing other than a transparent ploy to divert attention from the Bush Administration's escalating problems, and to destroy Europe's political integrity, by forcing Europe to take a share of the blame for the inevitable defeat in Afghanistan.

But there's even more at stake here than Afghanistan: The world is on the brink of plunging into the greatest financial crisis of all time. If the Grand Coalition in Berlin were to break down over the question of the an expanded Bundeswehr deployment into Afghanistan, or if NATO itself were to be plunged into an uncontrollable crisis over this question, more would be lost than Germany's security in the Hindu Kush; we would be losing a potential partner in a solution to the entire systemic collapse.

From the very outset, just as with the Iraq war, the Afghanistan deployment was an operation that had been built on false assumptions. After seven long years of Operation Enduring Freedom, the influence of the Taliban and of the drug lords has yet to be broken. And if you consider that the Soviet Union, after ten years and hundreds of thousands of troops deployed, still failed to win its war in Afghanistan, then it's not advisable now, to act as if the deployment of a couple thousand Bundeswehr troops in southern Afghanistan were anything more than sending cannon-fodder into a war that has already been lost.

That does not mean, of course, that the world community should forswear the aim of rebuilding Afghanistan's economy and of replacing the devastating cultivation of opium with actual agricultural and industrial production. But that will only succeed if the current parameters are completely changed, putting an end to "Great Game" policy, and putting a true development policy onto the agenda, with the cooperation of Russia, China, India, and Afghanistan's other neighbors.