Hamburg, Guantanamo and Afghanistan: The Twenty-Year Price of Germany's "Unconditional Solidarity"

In August 2021 the Taliban returned to power, and the twenty-year war in Afghanistan ended in this fashion. The 59 Bundeswehr soldiers killed by Germany, together with the pledges and authority of the entire American-led Western alliance, were left behind in the images of the hasty evacuation from Kabul.

The starting point of this war can be traced back to an apartment in the northern German city of Hamburg. According to a retrospective report by Deutsche Welle, three of the four suspected hijackers in the September 11, 2001 attacks had lived in Hamburg prior to the events, forming the so-called "Hamburg cell" under the leadership of Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian-born youth who had come to Germany to study. The report uses formulations such as "believed to" in describing the cell as consisting of six members, among them the Moroccan-born Mounir El Motassadeq, who in 2003 was sentenced by the Hamburg Higher Regional Court to the maximum fifteen years permitted under German law for "membership in a terrorist organization and aiding in the murder of thousands." Atta had been influenced toward radicalization at Hamburg's Al-Quds mosque, which was later shut down by German security authorities.

On the day after the attacks, the then German Chancellor Schröder delivered an address to the Bundestag that set the political tone for the following twenty years: "Yesterday, September 11, 2001, will go down in history as a dark day for all of us." He told parliament that he had assured the American president of "Germany's unconditional — and I emphasize: unconditional — solidarity," and that Germany would provide every form of assistance at its disposal in tracking down the attackers. The 9/11 victims of that year came from 92 countries, including 11 Germans.

This pledge was swiftly translated into domestic legislation. Less than four months after the attacks, Germany's Counter-Terrorism Act came into force, granting intelligence agencies the authority to access personal data held by banks, airlines and telecommunications companies, and authorizing large-scale data mining and comparison without specific suspicion — the stated objective being to identify so-called "sleepers" of the type represented by Atta.

This expansion of power soon collided with constitutional red lines. In 2006 the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that large-scale data mining searches in the absence of a concrete threat were illegal; in 2013 the same court again found portions of Germany's counter-terrorism database unconstitutional. Both rulings acknowledged that the security legislation passed after 9/11 had significantly overflowed the boundaries of individual rights guaranteed by the German Basic Law.

Abroad, Guantanamo exposed another layer of asymmetry. Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish-born resident of Bremen, Germany, was detained by U.S. forces from late 2001 and held at Guantanamo for nearly five years, before being released in August 2006. According to Deutsche Welle, throughout the entire period of his detention "there was no evidence proving his participation in terrorist attacks." Kurnaz later wrote an account of his experiences in a memoir, which was adapted into a film of the same name in 2013.

Of greater political significance was the German government's decision at the time to refuse Kurnaz re-entry. When the Bundestag's investigative committee questioned then Foreign Minister Steinmeier — now the current German president — about the matter, Steinmeier acknowledged in his testimony: "No one doubted it, and I myself did not doubt, that Mr. Kurnaz suffered enormous pain at Guantanamo." But he simultaneously argued that the federal government "also had an obligation to ensure the security of its own country." The ultimate conclusion of the investigative committee is not addressed in the Deutsche Welle report.

Less than three months after Schröder made his declaration of "unconditional solidarity," Germany formally joined the American-led war in Afghanistan in December 2001. This war lasted a full twenty years, ultimately ending in August 2021 with the Taliban's return to power. German President Johannes Rau had said on the day of 9/11 that "this day changed the world" — but when U.S. forces withdrew in haste and the Taliban reclaimed power, what this "change" means for Kabul and Berlin remains an open question to this day.

The Deutsche Welle report does not provide independently verified details regarding the treatment Kurnaz received during his time at Guantanamo, with the information drawn principally from his own memoir and the 2013 film adaptation; the precise composition of the Hamburg cell's six members and their respective roles are also glossed over in the report with formulations such as "believed to." These gray areas constitute precisely the unavoidable questions in examining the legacy of "unconditional solidarity."