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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (251626)	9/16/2005 5:01:50 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1576152

German troops should leave Afghanistan - CDU MP 16 Sep 2005 19:48:32 GMT Source: Reuters BERLIN, Sept 16 (Reuters) - German troops should be recalled from Afghanistan to avoid being sucked into a quagmire, a lawmaker from Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) party was quoted as saying in a newspaper interview on Friday. "Our goal must be to get German troops out of Afghanistan and home as quickly as possible rather than sink in the Afghan swamp," Willy Wimmer, a former junior defence minister, told Saturday's Koelner Stadt Anzeiger, according to an advance summary. "The Pashtuns are fighting for ethnic goals, not democratic niceties," Wimmer added, referring to Afghanistan's main ethnic group, of which President Hamid Karzai is a member. Germany is the biggest contributor to a NATO-led peacekeeping mission (ISAF) of 10,000 troops stationed in Afghanistan alongside a separate force of mainly U.S. combat troops. The German parliament is due to decide soon on a proposal to increase the number of German troops in the country to around 3,000 from the current 2,250. Germany - like Afghanistan - goes to the polls on Sunday. Merkel's conservatives are expected to become the largest party in parliament, although without an absolute majority and it is not clear yet who will be her coalition partner. Because of the time it takes to form a new government, Germany's current parliament - not the one being elected on Sunday - will decide on the renewal of the Afghan mandate. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government was the first to deploy German troops abroad since World War Two. His defence minister said the threat of terrorism meant defence of Germany started in the Hindukush mountains in Afghanistan. Germany's CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, has so far backed the deployment of German peacekeepers abroad. The party's election manifesto says, however, foreign peacekeeping should not come at the expense of domestic security. alertnet.org