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What Germany Left Behind A Feeling of Abandonment in North Afghanistan

Six months ago, Germany's military withdrew from Kunduz in northern Afghanistan. Since then, regional security has eroded and many of those left behind feel abandoned. Some say that the departure came too soon.

Captain Faridoon Hakimi is sitting next to an enormous barbecue once used by the Germans to grill sausage, munching on an almond and squinting. There isn't a cloud in the sky and the midday sun is blazing down onto the former German military camp in Kunduz in northern Afghanistan. Next to him stands a solitary sign in the German language indicating the location of a certain "Büro Baumlade."

It has been six months since Hakimi's friends and allies from Germany left the camp. All of the parking slots for helicopters and armored vehicles are empty. The white blimp, which once held cameras aloft in order to monitor the camp's immediate surroundings, no longer floats in the sky above.

"We don't need reconnaissance," says Hakimi, 32, the new camp commander who oversees the Afghan National Army troops stationed there. "We have our eyes." The blimp, he says smiling, was a waste of money anyway. Hakimi wears a carefully trimmed beard -- and rubber sandals.

His eyes shift to the horizon where the mountains are slowly turning green, indicating spring's approach. Hakimi knows that the green also means the Taliban will soon be back.

For 10 years, Germany was responsible for the province of Kunduz as part of its role in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). It was the first real war the Bundeswehr , as Germany's military is known, participated in, and Berlin's aims were lofty indeed. German development experts were to help extend rights to women, democracy was to be fostered and the economy was to grow significantly. Billions of euros were made available -- and the blood of German soldiers was spilled. Kunduz was a place of great sacrifice.

Until Oct. 6, 2013. On that day, Germany handed over the camp to Afghanistan.

'Too Soon'

"They ran away," croaks the deputy police chief for the Kunduz province in his office and gestures dismissively. "They simply ran away. It was too soon."

"It was too soon. It was like an escape." One can hear almost exactly the same thing from the mouths of German soldiers, some of whom even compare the Bundeswehr's departure with that of the Americans from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. "If there is one thing the Bundeswehr is really good at, it's retreating," is a sentiment that can often be heard in the government quarter in Berlin these days.

What, though, did the Germans really manage to accomplish in Kunduz and what did the 25 Germans killed in the region die for? What did all the money buy? What remains of the mission? Berlin would rather not provide an answer to these questions: A complete evaluation of the Afghanistan engagement is not on the agenda.

But there are answers to be found in the Kunduz Province itself. The closer one gets to the former German camp, the emptier the roads become. There are no trees to block one's view of the far-away horizon; occasionally, a burned out car or oil drum lies on the shoulder of the road. The pizza delivery service once patronized by the Germans has closed its doors. A few uniformed soldiers are rolling out barbed wire at the camp's entrance. "We are here to guard the buildings," says Said Muyer, 25, of the Afghan police. He says he is essentially in charge, adding that the real commander hardly ever makes an appearance.

The road passes by empty guard houses and torn open sandbags on the way into a ghost town of broad roads, vacant barracks and open ground where helicopters once took off and landed. It seems like a settlement of aliens who stayed for a time but then left after realizing that the planet was inhospitable -- despite the fitness studios, bars and the big German barbecue.

Some 2,000 soldiers were once stationed in the camp, but there are few relics of their presence among the ruins: an aluminum can that once contained processed meat, packages of "Exotic" drink mix and a few slices of whole-grain bread.

"They only left garbage behind," says Muyer, kicking a container of potato goulash. "We don't eat stuff like that." He rattles the door leading into the mess hall, inside of which the tables and chairs are neatly stacked. "Everything is locked up," he says. Muyer says that the refrigerators were already gone by the time he arrived, sold in the town market.

Escape to Germany

Muyer and a few dozen others have been living in three of the roughly 50 buildings in the camp, originally built by Berlin at a cost of some €126 million. Where, though, is the police training center mentioned in a January progress report produced by the Foreign Ministry? Muyer looks confused and shakes his head saying it's the first time he's heard of it. A few of his men are playing volleyball while others are shelling beans for dinner. One wants to know the best way to escape to Germany.

The walls in a building called "Dresden" are badly cracked while water drips through the roof in "Frankfurt." "We aren't plumbers," Muyer says.

In the middle of this declining ghost town, the army commander Hakimi is fighting -- in his rubber sandals -- to maintain a semblance of order and normality. He and his men are neighbors to Muyer and the police contingent, but the small area under Hakimi's control is separated by a wall. And it looks as if Hakimi is trying to maintain a mini-Germany in defiance of the surrounding decay. There is no garbage to be seen, no potholes and even the cedar trees lining the roads are still green. "Twice a week, every soldier has to muster and help clean up," Hakimi says, a convention he introduced. Hakimi also bought two solar panels to make up for the frequent power outages that plague the camp now that it is reliant on the Kunduz grid after the Germans removed their generators.

The commander rhapsodizes about his time serving alongside the Germans. They used to sit around the fire drinking beer and wine and even cooked together, he says. He was particularly impressed by the Germans' dependability. During the summer, they would sleep side-by-side on their cots in Baghlan. "They really trusted us," Hakimi says, squinting all the more.

Then he begins talking about last winter, the most difficult one of his life: It was the winter that the Germans left. Hakimi wears a tattoo of a crescent moon and a star between his thumb and index finger, made by a battlefield comrade back when Hakimi was fighting in the mountains against the Taliban as part of the Northern Alliance. "Face to face," he says, describing the campaign. He has been at war his entire life, but nothing compares to last winter.

A Breather Between Firefights

He spent much of it making repeated visits to the province of Badakhshan. It was cold, he says, and his men didn't have proper boots. There was no heating, there were constant power outages and they repeatedly ran out of fuel. The rebels, Hakimi says, are just as unpredictable as they have ever been. He says he got air support from ISAF only at the very beginning of his foray into Badakhshan, and only for a few days.

"The enemy's morale has improved," he says. "I saw many of my men die." Of the 720 soldiers under his command, only around 150 are in the camp. The rest are fighting elsewhere and Hakimi, too, could be ordered into battle at any time.

And then it becomes eminently clear that the small, secluded Germany where Hakimi is sitting has little to do with his reality. The camp was the nucleus of the German mission to Afghanistan for 10 years; for Hakimi it is merely a place where he can grab a breather between firefights.

In Berlin, politicians like to talk about the number of Afghan girls who are now able to attend school and how smoothly the elections went. "Normal life is possible along the main traffic arteries," a German general recently intoned before journalists in Berlin. Not everything is bad in Afghanistan; that is the message. But security in the north is crumbling, a truth that even government reports have been forced to admit, and the situation looks even more fragile when one takes a closer look at the fleeting coalitions and peculiar people it depends on.

The men of Afghanistan's local police forces, for example, provide something of a final bulwark in the fight against terrorism. The US military trained the poorly paid auxiliary policemen as a way of augmenting the regular police and military. The idea was to show a greater presence in rural areas where otherwise there would be nobody.

Today, the auxiliary police can be found in outposts that are only reachable on dirt roads; they often consist of little more than a few sandbags and mattresses thrown on the ground. The police are armed with Kalashnikovs and get around on motorcycles, and it is not a rarity for them to lose an eye or an arm -- or their lives -- in roadside detonations. Some commanders have even stopped leaving the safety of their own homes. Human rights organizations have accused local police units of extorting protection money from the populace or committing acts of violence. It is also said that local warlords have infiltrated the police units with their own militia. When one asks members of the police force in the district of Chahar Dara about their ties to the notorious warlord Mir Alam, for example, they remain silent.

Development Work? What Development Work?

Just how dependent the region's fragile stability is on local militias can be understood by listening to the story another man has to tell. He arrives in a green pick-up, accompanied by two armed men.

In the basement of a derelict hotel, he fishes a small plastic card out of the pocket of his vest -- a kind of identification, but also his life insurance. Mr. Mohamed Khan -- not his real name -- is no longer a terrorist; he switched sides. The card attests to the fact that he joined the peace process between the government and the rebels of his own free will. It also says that he too now enjoys the rights of a normal Afghan citizen. Apparently, that wasn't always the case.

Khan lights a cigarette. "In the summer, we slept in the mountains and built bombs," he says, describing his time with the Taliban. "In the winter, we lived in the city of Quetta in Pakistan." He says that he often fought against the Germans, and even killed some of them, adding that he himself was also wounded; he pushes up his sleeve to display bullet hole scars on his arm and shoulder.

The Taliban, he says, paid well.

Ultimately, though, he decided to switch sides, having been convinced to take the step by a village elder and a former Taliban commander. Now, Khan's men fight for the government and occasionally get a bit of money from the secret service. But he also has more enemies. He is not, he says, particularly pleased with his new lot in life.

He is responsible for security in several villages in the eastern part of the province, a region that is home to hundreds of Pashtun families, but also has to provide for his own six children. He says he is trying to get a bit of money from a development aid fund, but has been unsuccessful thus far, a failure he attributes to discrimination against Pashtuns, the ethnicity that gave birth to the Taliban.

Lubricated by Money

"If nothing comes in," he finally says, "I'll have to switch sides again." But it wouldn't be easy to return to the Taliban. He drags on his cigarette and says he would have to come up with a convincing story -- a major operation or perhaps an attack. It seems as though the fragile stability in Kunduz has to be lubricated by money.

Berlin is fond of portraying the situation in northern Afghanistan in rosier terms: The soldiers may be gone, according to the official line, but civilian aid workers have remained. "We have to demonstrate to the Afghans that we aren't leaving them behind," says the Development Ministry. Workers with the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) say that nothing has changed since the troop withdrawal.

"GIZ? They were here once," says Asila Barekzai, a member of the Kunduz provincial council. "But not anymore. Not that I know of anyway." Barekzai no longer dares to travel as much as she used to, a product of increased nighttime gunfire and a recent attack on her vehicle. She says she doesn't understand in the first place why there is a desire to continue development work in the complete absence of security. "We need the German troops," she says. She's not the only one who hasn't seen evidence of German development work lately. No matter who you ask in the city -- journalists, police or former Afghan employees of the German military -- all say they haven't seen any Germans for some time.

Afghanistan, though, is supposed to be one of GIZ's most important partner countries, with 227 German employees in the country. Yet fully 159 of them are in Kabul, far away from the people they hope to help; GIZ even maintains its own public relations department in the capital. Indeed, only nine international development experts work in Kunduz according to official numbers, and even the program designed to help former Afghan employees of the Bundeswehr  find new jobs moved from Kunduz to Mazar-e-Sharif, where German troops are still present, in December.

Although there have been some clear accomplishments on the part of German development agencies in Kunduz over the past decade, other aspects of cooperation have remained hazy, hidden behind phrases such as "structural assistance" and "regional capacity development." Visiting projects in Kunduz? Unfortunately not possible at the moment, the GIZ press department responds in reply to an inquiry. Unfortunately, there are no international employees on site at the moment. Instead, they offer an interview in a Kabul luxury hotel surrounded by concrete barricades. Numerous security checks must be passed through before reaching the lobby, while a dog sniffs for explosives.

A Different World

Francisco Villela, a well-tanned man in a starched shirt, is perched on a plush, orient-themed settee. For a little over a year, Villela has headed up the GIZ's economic assistance program; prior to that, he was stationed in Central America. Villela can sound quite convincing when speaking of GIZ's "multi-level approach," meaning that both governments and rural farmers are supported concurrently. He is particularly passionate when talking about Holstein cows, which give several times the quantity of milk produced by standard Afghan cows. He says things like: "We have to focus more on cattle management." They are sentences from a different world.

Villela says that he tries to visit Kunduz once a month, though he unfortunately isn't always able to. He also admits that there aren't any German employees there from his program. He doesn't deny that the economy in Kunduz has suffered as a result of the German troop withdrawal and the reduction in money available.

He says he just completed a project progress report, which has occupied much of his time in recent days. But everything went well, he says, and he is planning on flying back to Germany tomorrow. He too belongs to the alien species.

In Kunduz, commander Hakimi, the last admirer of the Germans, is sitting in his "Baumlade" office. He says he just heard a disturbing report on the radio indicating that the international community might cut the amount of money available to the Afghan army because the bilateral security agreement  between Kabul and Washington hasn't yet been signed. "We have Tajiks, Uzbeks and Pashtuns here, we fight together like brothers," Hakimi says. "But without money, we will be gone in a month."

Left in the Lurch

Does he still have armored vehicles? No, he says, unfortunately not. "But we do have big guns!" He sends a soldier off to get the weapons and has him lay them out on the ground when he returns. There is an old Soviet PK machine gun, an American machine gun known as a "mini-gun" and a rocket launcher. "Very effective," Hakimi says.

He says he loves his country, his daughter and his son and that it is them he is fighting for. He envisions a future under Sharia law for his daughter -- but for him, that means that she should love God, but that she should be able to live freely, go to university and become a doctor.

Did they leave too early, his erstwhile German allies? Hakimi doesn't answer right away. He doesn't want to say anything bad about the Germans. "It wasn't a military decision, it was a political one," he finally says. It is a terribly German thing to say; it sounds like it could have come straight from the Defense Ministry press department in Berlin.

But then he closes with a very Afghan sentiment: "Friends shouldn't leave friends in the lurch," he says. Then he bows his head.

Translated from the German by Charles Hawley
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