Germany rolls over authorization for Afghan force (2nd Lead)

Dec 3, 2009, 16:50 GMT

   Berlin - Germany's parliament extended Thursday for one more year its authorization for 4,500 German soldiers to serve with NATO in Afghanistan.

   At the same time, Germany's Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg admitted that an airstrike in September in which dozens of Afghan civilians were killed was 'militarily not appropriate.'

The Bundestag parliament approved the Afghanistan mission in a 445-105 vote, with many opposition Social Democrats voting alongside Chancellor Angela Merkel's governing parties to emphasize it was a bipartisan policy. Some 43 legislators abstained in the division.

The re-authorization for Germans to serve in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was one of three being put to the vote. The other authorizations were for naval units off Lebanon and off the Horn of Africa.

The ISAF mission is controversial in Germany. The September 4 airstrike and the withholding of documents that showed it was ill-advised led last week to a former defence minister, Franz Josef Jung, losing his post as labour minister.

Chancellor Angela Merkel had to reshuffle her cabinet barely a month after it had been sworn in.

   Guttenberg's pronouncement was both a backtrack on his own remarks a month ago, when he called the airstrike 'militarily appropriate,' and a rebuke to the colonel who summoned US fighter-bombers to blow up two fuel tanker trucks stolen by the Taliban.

The trucks were stalled in a river bed in the middle of the night. Estimates of the toll of dead and injured vary, but go as high as 142, without a precise categorization of who was a civilian and who was a Taliban member.

   Guttenberg, who said he did not doubt that Colonel Georg Klein was acting in the interests of his own soldiers, told parliament that he had not known of certain documents at the time he made his previous judgement about the September 4 airstrike.

   Those documents had since led him to change his mind, he said. News reports say Klein's forces were not close to the tankers, whereas night-imaging devices in the jets showed a crowd of persons, probably civilians, near the tankers before they were bombed.

Guttenberg had already said conceded there were procedural errors in the strike. ISAF has already rebuked the Germans, telling them they should have checked with the ISAF command before sending in bombers.

   As other NATO allies pledged to increase force levels in Afghanistan, Germany remains cautious, insisting it wait and see what happens at a conference on Afghan policy in January in London.

   Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said he would increase the focus over the next four years on a withdrawal of international forces from Afghanistan.

   He told the Bundestag the purpose of the mission was to achieve self-sustaining security in Afghanistan.

   'Nobody wants it to last forever,' he said.

   Germany has shied away from discussion this week of increasing the contingent, despite calls from US President Barack Obama to the allies at large to contribute more soldiers.