German Chancellor Angela Merkel will brave a public backlash in coming weeks and commit more troops to Afghanistan to placate her NATO allies, a step that looks likely to raise Germany’s contingent by nearly a quarter.
US President Barack Obama and NATO have urged Germany to bolster its military presence just as it and other Western allies seek to craft an exit strategy from a country that has become an increasing headache for Merkel at home.
Sending more soldiers to Afghanistan would fly in the face of public opinion and expose the chancellor to increasing opposition on an issue that polls suggest have already dented government support and undermined her authority.
“Merkel has hummed and hawed on this debate from day one,” said Henning Riecke, an analyst at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. “But the government is going to have to send more combat troops, it will just be as few as they can.”
Merkel is expected to give a government declaration on Jan. 27 to outline Germany’s strategy for Afghanistan ahead of an international conference on the mission in London a day later.
Germany has a mandate for 4,500 troops in Afghanistan, the third biggest NATO contingent, though they are based in the north of the country, away from the areas of heaviest fighting.
At the conference, Berlin aimed to outline its plans for improving Afghan governance and security, said Henning Otte, a defense expert in Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats.
NATO first needed to establish clear goals and how they would be met before Germany could consider raising the threshold for its troop strength in Afghanistan, Otte said.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS