The War on Terror

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Introduction

Ten years ago, the German government decided about the involvement in the ‘war on terror’ and his Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and the intervention in Afghanistan as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). This decision based on the resolutions 1368, 1378, 1383 and 1386 of the Security Council of the United Nation from November and December 2001. These resolutions legitimated the general conditions for the intervention from the perspective of the international law. Therefore also Germany’s participation in the war in terms of the system of a reciprocal collective security referred to article 24 of the German Basic Law (2006, p. 22). However, why voted Germany’s government for the deployment of military forces to Afghanistan? The initiative for the intervention came from the United States as reaction to the terrorist attacks from September 2001 to ensure the status as hegemonic power (Buro, 2009, p. 10). But civil war and terrorist networks were not at all a new phenomenon in Afghanistan. The German motives which entail the decision to be part of the OEF and the ISAF are the main research topics for this paper. Moreover, it intends to analyse the decision-making process for Germany’s participation in the war according to the methodological approach of ‘Bureaucratic Politics’, explained by Graham Allison (2008). To guarantee a solid understanding of this complex process, this paper will analyse all three models of Allison’s approach. It seems necessary related to Germany’s political system, in which organisations as well as individuals are closely linked as essential part of the policy and therefore influential actors in the decision-making process of the government. In this context numerous of...

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...enefit for Germany after the war and the establishment of a liberal economical system, Western democratic values, and institutions. It would be the best way to promote peace and to assist prosperity – for Afghanistan as well as for the whole world. Additionally, the neo-liberalism assumes that democracies will not fight each others. The German government supports these goals and a ‘state building process’ in its ‘Afghanistan concept’, which defines the interdependence of security, development and reconstruction (2007, p. 15-30).

Moreover, the importance of institutions and non-state actors that neo-liberalism attributes to international politics such as human rights, environmental issues as well as threats of terrorist organisations and networks creates an explanatory power of the global system which lacks completely in the theoretical approach of neo-realism.

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