"I, like most Germans, am very conscious of my country's history. I am even apprehensive about insecticide commercials. I know there is only one step from insecticide to genocide."
--Werner Herzog
Among the many things we did not need, but have received anyway from George II in his War on Terra, is the sight of a German soldier extending his exposed penis towards the opened jaw of a human skull.
Neither did we need to see German soldiers festooning their vehicles with Nazi emblems, mounting skulls on the hoods of their patrol vehicles, or pressing their weapons to the temples of Afghan boys, laughingly enacting "mock executions."
But this is what we have seen anyway. Because George II felt it necessary, in this age of his apocalypse, that the Germans give up their panty-waist post-1945 pacifism, and goose-step again onto the world stage. That they join his coalition of the imbecilic, blunder hand-in-hand with him into the trap of Afghanistan.
So that millions of living human beings, brains burned indelibly with images of the last time the Germans moved outside their borders, might enter now not into sleep, but into nightmare: "is it happening, again?"
All armies, in all wars, behave badly. It could not be otherwise. Armies are about killing people and breaking things. As such, they are the antithesis of life. Life is creation and construction; war is death and destruction.
But the German military of WWII behaved particularly badly. There is no need to go into the war porn of detail. Let Herzog say it: "The Germans were a dignified people, the greatest philosophers, composers, writers and mathematicians. And, in the space of only ten years, they created a barbarism more terrible than had ever been seen before."
Stalin wanted post-WWII Germany reduced to a bucolic pre-industrial state. Churchill would have none of that: post-WWII Germany was to be the first bulwark against the Godless Communist State. Thus he convinced the witless Truman to "rehabilitate" Nazis by the truckload, dumping them into the front ranks of the new West German state. But Truman drew the line at a vigorous German military. The German soldiery, thank you very much, could stay safely inside their barracks.
This pretty much remained American policy until George II. But George II--a man who has purposefully forgotten his own history, and seems to have learned nothing of anyone else's--has throughout his administration vigorously pushed both Germany, and that other bad actor of WWII, Japan, to abandon their justifiably shamefaced attitudes towards military adventurism, goosing them to again aggressively rattle their sabers and go charging across the globe, slashing down foes. Foes of George II's choosing.
There is no reason for German troops to be in Afghanistan. They are there as part of a NATO force, but it is patently absurd that NATO--the "North Atlantic Treaty Organization"--could have any interest in Afghanistan. Afghanistan does not remotely touch, at any point, the "North Atlantic."
NATO is a relic of the Cold War, formed to serve as a shield against perceived aggression from the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. But it has been more than a decade since the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and its former satellites are now joined with such nations as Germany in the confederation of the European Union. The Cold War is over. Europe is at peace. NATO is an anachronism. Today, it serves only as a cat's-paw of American imperial power.
Germany has no need for any military at all, much less one that travels into Central Asia to stick its dick into a human skull mounted upon a jeep decorated with Nazi markings. Germany is at peace with its neighbors. Western Europe, after its near-suicide of 1939-1945, has beaten, at least against its neighbors, its swords into ploughsares. No EU country, against its neighbors, requires any military at all.
If the human race is to survive, it will at some point have to abandon armies. This is a good place to start. Costa Rica, as an example, has no army. As the US and the USSR played bloody chess across Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, Costa Rica was certainly more threatened than Germany is now. Germany cannot possibly more need an army than does Costa Rica. So, German troops should not only get out of Afghanistan, they should get out of Germany. They are no longer needed. They are the functional equivalent of the human appendix: they no longer fulfill any useful purpose, are vestigial, can cause nothing but harm to the host.
Of course the United States does not require a military, either. The actual United States consists of the 48 contiguous states--stretching from Atlantic to Pacific, Canada to Mexico. Everything else is an imperial possession, and should, and someday will, be abandoned. The United States is in no way threatened by its neighbors. And if one is not threatened by one's neighbors, one needs not a military. The Founders were allergic to a standing army. I pray that we contract again that allergy in my lifetime.