Afghan Security Forces inspect the remains of a bombed fuel tanker. (AP/Getty Images)At 1:51 a.m. on the morning of September the 4th, German Colonel Georg Klein ordered two American F-15's to bomb a pair of stranded fuel tankers that had been hijacked by the Taliban only hours earlier.  There were people swarming around the tankers at the time, but an informant had confirmed that they were all Taliban, including four leaders.  NATO General Rules of Engagement and Standard Operations Procedures require specific conditions for calling in an air strike: the target must be time sensitive and NATO troops must be in immediate danger in the area.  Neither was true that night; there were no NATO troops present and the tankers had been stuck in the mud for hours.  NATO rules alternately call for a warning to limit civilian casualties and so the American pilots asked to fly over the tankers at a low altitude- a "show of force" to give the people on the ground a chance to flee.  Klein refused the request and ordered an immediate bombing - perhaps in response to intelligence that the Taliban was going to use trucks in an attack on the Germans.  With Klein's terse "weapons release" order, the "planes released two GBU-38 radar-guided bombs, each with a 500-pound warhead. The target dissolved in an enormous fireball."  Rather than entirely consisting of Taliban, at least 79 Afghan villagers were killed in the process of unloading the fuel for the Taliban under armed coercion. 

The massive civilian casualties caused a huge outcry in Germany; Col. Klein might be brought up on criminal charges and the Left Party, the only German party favoring immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, staged a massive protest at the Brandenburg gate and was rewarded with a 4% increase in the recent Parliamentary elections.  Because post-Nazi Germany was established as a pacifist country it officially cannot be at war, so their very moderate presence in Northern Afghanistan officially consists of civilian reconstruction instead of combat.  As German Defense Minister Franz Jung puts it: "the Bundeswehr's mission is to protect, assist, act as an intermediary and -- last of all -- fight."  Perhaps as a consequence, the Germans have seen very little violence in the region of Northern Afghanistan leading to years of boasting of how well their semi-pacifist methods work.  Meanwhile, their NATO allies have complained that the Germans aren't seeing any violence because they are simply allowing the Taliban to operate freely- their pacificism is appeasement masquerading as principle.  As counterintuitive as it seems, increasing violence- at least in the short term- is viewed as positive sign, since it means that NATO troops are actually engaging the Taliban.  After the catastrophe bombing of the tankers, other NATO countries piled on condemning the attack, in what one German diplomat termed: “Schadenfreude against the eternal know-it-alls.” 

This incident crystallizes the many challenges and changes going on in Afghanistan.  A new American administration has brought a new strategy to the eight year old fight, even as some of their NATO counterparts are still getting on board with the old, more confrontational, strategy.  There is turmoil on every level of Afghanistan right now, but domestic pressures in America and in its NATO allies Germany, Britain, France and Canada will ultimately decide the outcome of the conflict.  Germany was just the first to feel the political heat from a war that has no end in sight, necessitating deeper commitments at a time when many want to abandon the venture altogether.  Rather than digging deeper, I expect a flurry of NATO allies joining Canada in withdrawing.