In a SPIEGEL ONLINE interview today, Jeremy Shapiro, Director of Research at the Center on the US and Europe at Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, mentions that the Unites States would have been better off if the Europeans had never been involved in Afghanistan. “The European effort, including the German one, has been absolutely appalling in this area,” he sighed.

The Americans are at war in Afghanistan. They don’t need allies who don’t even know about that simple fact. When I recently asked a specific question to a respective officer of the German Armed Forces, he could only confirm that Germany is actually not at war in Afghanistan.

It is an embarrassing, in a way humiliating, situation how the German Bundestag has sent its soldiers to the region. Some have been killed already in terrorist attacks, but the German Defense Minister is not ready, or doesn’t dare, to call a dead soldier a KIA. So, instead of freezing in fear and waiting for President Barrack Obama calling for new troops, rather admit that the concept of pacification and build-up democracy has fundamentally failed. And send these soldiers home. Let America win its war against terror alone.