Bones Of Contention

For months, the Taliban in Afghanistan have been honing their p.r. skills, launching a website and handing out spokesmen's phone numbers to reporters, in a bid to convince Afghans of the moral degeneracy of the international forces in their country. Most of their reports have been fabricated.

But last week, true stories broke to rival their worst propaganda. On Oct. 25, the German daily Bild published German soldiers' snapshots depicting up to six of them posing with human bones, possibly those of Afghan war victims. In one photo, taken near Kabul in 2003, a grinning soldier is holding a skull next to his bared genitals. A TV station later aired another set, [an error occurred while processing this directive] suggesting this macabre pastime may be more than a onetime occurrence.

In Germany, the images have triggered acute embarrassment and outrage. Chancellor Angela Merkel pronounced them "disgusting" and promised a full inquiry. Of the six soldiers identified so far, four have already completed their service. The others were suspended late last week. All may face investigation for desecration of human remains, a crime in Germany.

The photos have helped spark a debate about Germany's wider role in the world as well. As (bad) luck would have it, the first set appeared on the same day that the German Defense Ministry unveiled a security report that argued its military should bolster its presence overseas to levels not seen since World War II to address emerging threats from terrorism and weapons proliferation.

That would be quite a change. Germans, mindful of their own history, have only in recent years agreed to dispatch troops abroad, mainly for peacekeeping or humanitarian missions. Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, an independent think tank, says the photos — and the response to them — demonstrate how unprepared Germany has been to find itself in a far more violent and unpredictable conflict than the one it signed up for back in 2001. What started as a peacekeeping assignment as part of a multinational "stabilization" force, he says, has degenerated into a war zone, with very little reassessment of the mission back home. "It's very unhealthy," he says, "to have our troops in a war situation without the public and our parliament being fully aware of it." He has called for a full parliamentary debate on the Afghan deployment in order to ensure that German troops are trained and equipped to deal with the true nature of the environment.

Indeed, at least one of the soldiers implicated in the scandal has suggested that the stresses of deployment were perhaps partly responsible for his behavior. Fear and danger "may have lowered the inhibition threshold," he told Bild. In the end, his photos may well have increased Germany's inhibitions about broader military dispatches in the future.