Berlin: Germany’s foreign minister on Sunday said that Berlin had made serious mistakes in its military engagement in Afghanistan since 2001 and warned against a hasty withdrawal.
Ahead of the end of US-led NATO combat operations in the war-ravaged country, Frank-Walter Steinmeier offered a sobering assessment of the 13-year mission. “There is a lot to indicate that our biggest mistake was to create expectations that were too high,” he wrote in a column for the weekly Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
“We not only wanted to snuff out the security threat that Afghanistan represented but also lead the country at high speed into a future according to our own vision.” He said that despite progress in Afghanistan, the country was still plagued by a thriving drug trade and rampant corruption.
Warlords hold power in several provinces and violence abounds, he added, lamenting that the extremist Taliban had been “long been underestimated as a political player”. But he said the deployment should not be seen as a failure, noting that compared to the situation in Syria or Iraq “the results in Afghanistan are respectable”.
