State and Politics in Germany

What are German soldiers doing in Afghanistan? Are they engaged in an armed operation to stabilize a crisis region, or are they waging war? This question has been hotly debated since Bundeswehr soldiers were first stationed in Afghanistan. And even more so since they have increasingly come under fire there and it has become plain that they find themselves in a combat mission which claims casualties on both sides.

The phenomenon itself is as old as civilization and the concomitant duty to protect the state. Everywhere arresting ruins and monuments going back to the dawn of time bear witness to what is meant today by terms such as “new wars” or “asymmetric warfare”. Whether the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall or the Limes – all testify in the end to the futile efforts of highly-armed empires to check marauding barbarian hordes harassing their borders.

Like the guerilla militias and terrorist commandos of today, the marauders lacked comparable weaponry and armies, and so avoided open battle. Instead they resorted to ambushes, to terrorizing the population, to harassing trade routes – in short, to weakening the enemy economically and wearing him down militarily by a strategy of painful needle pricks.

“Obsolete model”: wars between states

All in all, the classical war between states, which reached an extreme expression in the two world wars, has become an “obsolete model”, in the words of the Berlin philosopher and political scientists Herfried Münkler. Western democracies, according to Münkler, are essentially “post-heroic societies”. “They are based on work and exchange, not on sacrifice and honor.” Since the experience of the First World War, “democracies are no longer in a position to wage symmetrical wars”.

Many of Münkler’s colleagues in international peace and conflict studies agree that war between nation states – at all events an invention of modern times – has become senseless in view of the destructive power of nuclear weapons and the high vulnerability of modern societies.

This is a development that already took place in the days of the East-West conflict, which the arms race and threat of assured mutual destruction froze into a “Cold War”. Only one third of the wars after 1945 have been between states, calculates Münkler, with the tendency declining. And whereas at the beginning of the twentieth century only one in ten war dead was a civilian, this ratio was reversed by the end of the century. Meanwhile, the proxy war became the preferred means of the superpowers for prosecuting their struggle.

Blurred line between war and peace

Proxy wars were fought out mainly in the form of civil wars in the Third World, where new states were formed and old conflicts broke out in the wake of decolonization. The potentates and rival groups that there carried on the ongoing struggle for power, territory and natural resources often acted as puppets of the adversaries in the Cold War and were generously supplied by both with weapons and money. Out of these civil wars came the strategies and tools for all the varieties of “new wars” that we have to deal with today.

In an essay on economies of violence and terrorism, the Duisburg conflict researcher Daniel Lambach makes the figure of the “warlord” or “entrepreneur of violence”, who establishes himself as local ruler in order to gain economic benefits, the characteristic feature of the new wars. These wars are “asymmetric” in that a huge imbalance of forces prevails between the warring parties: “They are led by irregular forces, violence is primarily directed against civilians, and combatants of the various sides often cooperate with each other for their mutual benefit”. In this way, the borders blur between war and peace, and even between the various warring parties. New wars are not officially declared, and also not decided on the battlefield. These are all characteristics that are in the end not all that “new” if we recall the circumstances and methods of warfare of the Thirty Years War.

Terror – the war of the twenty-first century

Since at least September 11, 2001, a particularly insidious variant of the new, asymmetric warfare has held the whole world in suspense: terrorism. “Terrorists avoid confrontation with the mailed fist of the opponent and instead aim at his soft underbelly. If the blood vessels and nerves that converge there are hit”, says Münkler, “the mailed fist falls down by itself”. Terror as the ultimate weapon of the weak against the strong is obviously not new. But unlike in the past, when it was used against selected targets and individuals so as to mobilize disaffected and oppressed masses, today nothing is any longer sacred – for suicide bombers, not even their own lives.

Münkler sees striking analogies between the classical war of devastation and the new forms of trans-national terrorism. “The more recent forms of terrorism are based on the idea that their asymmetry is not a temporary emergency measure, but rather the final key to success.” The bottom line of modern terrorism is that its sole purpose is to intimidate people and by this means to influence particularly the policy of democratic states. This is a lesson we have learned not only from Afghanistan.