Bundeswehr Chief Resigns over Ministry's Handling of Airstrike

The Bundeswehr's Chief of Staff, Wolfgang Schneiderhan, resigned this morning following revelations that information about civilian casualties caused by a deadly NATO airstrike in Afghanistan had been withheld from the Bundeswehr by the Defence Ministry.

On September 4, 2009 Colonel Georg Klein, a member of the Bundeswehr ,ordered up an American air strike on two tanker trucks that had been hijacked by insurgents a few days earlier at the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. The attack was devastating. The trucks were destroyed and there were almost 100 fatalities. However, many of the dead were women and children, and most definitely not insurgents. Ten days after the attack Der Spiegel online clearly identified why the incident was so devastating to the Bundeswehr, the government and the nation:

The two bombs dropped in this attack have shaken Germany's self-image. After the horrors of Hitler's Third Reich, the Germans strove to become the world's model country -- the good guys, the nice guys. From now on, nothing the Germans did was to evoke that dark chapter in history from 1933 to 1945.

A chronology of the events surrounding the attack can be found here. No one questions that civilians were killed. Nor does anyone in the Bundeswehr deny that NATO rules for engagement by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) were violated. The conflict that bubbled to the surface today with Schneiderhan's resignation is an internal German affair relating to civil-military relations. According to reports on thelocal.de, "a secret Bundeswehr document attained by Bild, [former German Defence Minister Franz Josef] Jung was informed of the deaths much earlier than previously thought." The Bundeswehr feels that it was misled by its political masters, who were aware of civilian casualties but did not inform the military; Schneiderhan's resignation is an expression of that lack of confidence. For Canadians this crisis will have familiar echoes. The Canadian military and foreign service are currently involved in a dispute about Canadian detainees being transferred to Afghan custody. The government insists that it only learned about torture allegations almost one-year after the military and diplomats contend that they informed them.