Reports about the Bundeswehr: This operation must be recorded

It happened: I was drafted. I've been in the ranks of the Bundeswehr for about a year and a half now, even though I never wanted to go there. Politicians around me dream of the German army as the strongest in Europe. In front of me lies the huge swamp of billions in armaments. I crawl through the murky terrain of procurement processes and am constantly surrounded by this foul smell.

Well, I wasn't called up as a soldier - but here in the editorial office. I report for the taz about the Bundeswehr and the world that surrounds it. I stumbled into my role as I should. Sometimes I feel like I'm embedded. Do you still know the term? It feels like it comes from the last century, from the time when journalists traveled to wars with NATO soldiers and brought back home stories from the front in Afghanistan and Iraq. The practice of embedded journalism was controversial at the time, but today the debate has been almost forgotten.

It was about whether you could report independently as a journalist if you had to see what was being presented to you by the army. At that time, politicians still harbored the dream that civilizational victories around the world could be achieved through the military. In this sense, the general public should also be informed about the “successes” in the target countries.

I ask myself: Did one or two stories from the field camp in Afghanistan contribute to the fact that the political mission in the country was at some point only understood in purely military terms? And to what extent did this framing play a role in the fundamental failure of the country's stabilization? The images of the chaotic evacuation mission, which is currently celebrating its fifth anniversary, are still fresh in my mind. And I have to say: you have strengthened my anti-militarist stance.

One observation that I have made in the short time that I have now been embedded on the home front is: The fact that in the end almost everything that could have gone wrong went wrong in Afghanistan is also burned into the minds of the Bundeswehr - deeper than one would think from the outside. Almost all German soldiers who have rank and name today were deployed there at some point. They remember very well the excessive expectations they were expected to live up to - before they were forgotten along with the other Potemkin villages that had been built in Afghanistan.

I suspect that this shameful story is not intended to be given too much space. Since Russia's bloodthirsty war in Ukraine and the muscle flexing in other places in Europe - including the recent bomb discoveries in Leipzig - the expectations of the Bundeswehr are too high, including socially. So I too, embedded as I am in these new social and military expectations, have other questions than those equipped with a writing pad and protective vest in the Bundeswehr wheeled tank in the Afghan desert. But this operation must also be recorded as it is. With that in mind: Welcome to my column!