The German aid worker dramatically freed in Kabul after being abducted was returning home to Germany on Tuesday amid a rising debate on the politically controversial deployment of troops to Afghanistan. Christina Meier, who was abducted on Saturday, left Kabul Tuesday bound for Germany.
Meier's abduction from a Kabul cafe in broad daylight and her dramatic freeing shortly after midnight on Monday has raised concerns in Germany about the safety of aid workers in Afghanistan.
The deaths of three police officers attached to the German embassy in Kabul last week, when their protected vehicle was blown up by a roadside bomb, has highlighted the dangers faced by German security personnel.
In addition to the three police officers, Germany has lost 25 troops since the start of the Afghan deployment almost six years ago, 14 of them to attacks. While this contrasts with the 70 the British have lost, there is growing unease in the German population about the deployment.
Following a meeting of the heads of the political parties in Germany's broad coalition government, Social Democrat (SPD) leader Kurt Beck said two of the three German mandates would be debated by parliament at the beginning of October.
The third mandate - the controversial commitment of up to 100 elite German troops to the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) - would be debated in November only after the SPDhad discussed the issue at its late-October party congress, Beck said.
The leaders of the coalition parties - Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), with their Bavarian sister-party the Christians Socialists (CSU), and the SPD - continued to back extending all three mandates, Beck said.
Opposition to the OEF mandate, even though the elite German troops have not in fact been deployed since 2005, is strong with the SPD, and there is also concern regarding the stationing of six German reconnaissance Tornado jets in Afghanistan.
Support for the main mandate for up to 3,600 troops engaged in reconstruction work in northern Afghanistan under the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) remains strong within the party. Beck was speaking after a late-night meeting Monday of the coalition's political leaders on a range of topics.
"We are recommending to government members and to the parliamentary parties that they combine the ISAF and Tornado deployments in one mandate and decide at the beginning of October," he said. Recent opinion polls show rising opposition to Germany's involvement, with at least half the population in favour of a rapid pull-out.
There are widespread fears that Germany could become a terrorist target, particularly as a result of the Tornado deployment, which assists ISAF combat troops in the troubled south.
Egon Bahr, the veteran SPD member who was a key architect of former Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik in the 1970s, suggested in an interview published Tuesday that the 40,000 Western troops deployed to Afghanistan were far too few.
"The aim of turning Afghanistan into a stable state will possibly not be achievable within 10 years even with 200,000 soldiers," Bahr said, noting that: "Nobody is even talking about creating democratic structures any more."
Bahr said Germany could not unilaterally abandon its international commitments, but he issued an appeal for Nato to evaluate its options and decide on its aims. The German parliament should renew the mandates for a year under condition that Nato use the year for a thoroughgoing analysis.
"The Western strategy of separating the stabilising reconstruction deployment and the military struggle against the Taliban has failed," the widely respected 85-year-old concluded.