Cameron Abadi: Does Germany Care If It Exports Terrorism?
[Cameron Abadi is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.]
If a drone passed over Pakistan's militant-plagued North Waziristan region, leaving in its wake a destroyed mosque and the corpses of at least eight terrorism suspects of German citizenship, how would you describe what happened?
You might say it's a reminder of the lethal efficiency of the CIA; an argument to remain vigilant in the war in Afghanistan; or further confirmation that Pakistan is, as the title of one recent book puts it, the world's most dangerous place.
But if you were the German government, it seems, you simply wouldn't say anything at all.
German officials have made no comment to date -- not least because they haven't been under any pressure to make one. The references to Monday's drone attack in Germany's major newspapers were nothing more than dutiful, buried under news of local protests in Stuttgart against a new train station, and burgeoning soap operas of the young soccer season. There were few signs of any Germans trying to muster outrage over the fact that German citizens had apparently been killed under cover of night by a foreign government.
It's true that the reports that Germans were among the victims of the attack are as yet unconfirmed; the CIA rarely discusses its operations in public. But the silence reminds one of the similar quiet that followed revelations that the government of former chancellor Gerhard Schröder had colluded in the prolongation of an innocent German citizen's confinement at the Guantánamo Bay prison. Indeed, it is of a piece with Germany's general diffidence toward -- even neurotic repression of -- the realities of the war on terror that the country sometimes gives the impression of having unwittingly signed up for. Germany provides the third-largest military force to NATO's mission in Afghanistan, but politicians have avoided using the word "war" for the duration of the engagement. Obfuscation became the solution to a public wildly hostile to military ventures...
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If a drone passed over Pakistan's militant-plagued North Waziristan region, leaving in its wake a destroyed mosque and the corpses of at least eight terrorism suspects of German citizenship, how would you describe what happened?
You might say it's a reminder of the lethal efficiency of the CIA; an argument to remain vigilant in the war in Afghanistan; or further confirmation that Pakistan is, as the title of one recent book puts it, the world's most dangerous place.
But if you were the German government, it seems, you simply wouldn't say anything at all.
German officials have made no comment to date -- not least because they haven't been under any pressure to make one. The references to Monday's drone attack in Germany's major newspapers were nothing more than dutiful, buried under news of local protests in Stuttgart against a new train station, and burgeoning soap operas of the young soccer season. There were few signs of any Germans trying to muster outrage over the fact that German citizens had apparently been killed under cover of night by a foreign government.
It's true that the reports that Germans were among the victims of the attack are as yet unconfirmed; the CIA rarely discusses its operations in public. But the silence reminds one of the similar quiet that followed revelations that the government of former chancellor Gerhard Schröder had colluded in the prolongation of an innocent German citizen's confinement at the Guantánamo Bay prison. Indeed, it is of a piece with Germany's general diffidence toward -- even neurotic repression of -- the realities of the war on terror that the country sometimes gives the impression of having unwittingly signed up for. Germany provides the third-largest military force to NATO's mission in Afghanistan, but politicians have avoided using the word "war" for the duration of the engagement. Obfuscation became the solution to a public wildly hostile to military ventures...