Afghanistan – Maas: “There will not be enough time to get everyone out” – Politics Abroad

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas (SPD) does not assume that Germany will be able to stream all German and Afghan local staff from Afghanistan until the end of the evacuation campaign at the end of August.

“We will not be able to get everyone out of Afghanistan in the remaining days of this military evacuation,” Maas said Tuesday afternoon on BILD LIVE television. It takes honesty to say it.

We are still in contact with 100 citizens and their families, whose location we also know. Today we are trying to get them back to the airport with reasonable safety in order to distribute them to one of our machines.”

“No one needs a visa, no one has to go through a security check to fly to Germany,” Maas explained again.

But how long can we save people at all?

The Americans said they would continue this military evacuation until August 31. For now, Washington is talking about the possibility of extending this, Maas said on BILD Live.

“You have to weigh how long you can guarantee the safety of the troops on the site and the people who wanted to fly,” Maas said. “This is a very difficult trade-off.”

He makes it clear again: there will never be enough time to get everyone to safety. That is why we are now beginning, with the United States and Great Britain, to think about how to get people out of Afghanistan after the military evacuation.

The end of a military evacuation should not be the end of opportunities for people to leave the country.

In BILD, Maas described the fact that the federal government had to negotiate an evacuation with the Taliban as “worse than the wrong world.” But he said, “We have absolutely no alternative. To do that, you have to take roads that you don’t want to go.”

The only real alternative would be to leave the local staff to their own devices. “And we’re not ready for that,” Maas explains.

He describes how difficult the situation is for the Bundeswehr at the location of the airport in Kabul. You decide every day who gets in and who doesn’t. Maas describes a “terrible job”. Therefore, the soldiers are exchanged regularly because the psychological stress of what they see is so terrible. “There are really horrific scenes.”

wrong assessment of the situation

The current situation “has a lot to do with the fact that we all misjudged the situation, that we did not assume that Kabul would collapse so quickly that the armed forces would not oppose President Ghani’s departure from the country.”

So far, 351 German citizens have been brought from Afghanistan with their families. Another 100 Germans will have to be transferred in the coming days.

Will he draw conclusions himself?

When asked about his personal responsibility, Maas told BILD Live: “Believe it or not: I’m not wasting a second or thinking about it right now.”

When asked, Maas said, “I suppose I would also draw my own conclusions about what is currently happening, how to deal with it and how to deal with it personally.”