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Geopolitics

Will Afghanistan Tarnish The End Of Angela Merkel's Tenure?

The German leader's aloofness on the collapse of Afghanistan has surprised many. For the past few months, her government has taken the issue too lightly and failed to debate it properly. This could prove a big mistake in her last weeks as German chancellor.

Will Afghanistan Tarnish The End Of Angela Merkel's Tenure?

Angela Merkel, German Chancellor, recorded during a special session on the situation in Afghanistan in the German Bundestag

Jacques Schuster

Anyone who summarizes Angela Merkel's government statement on the situation in Afghanistan comes up with the same words: "somewhat stupid." The coolness with which the chancellor and her government are approaching the collapse of the Afghan state has been breathtaking. It almost seems as if Merkel and Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz have agreed to talk about abstract mistakes, in an effort to consign the Afghan failure to history's rubbish heap as quickly as possible.

Merkel is helped by the fact that she's about to leave: Her 16-year tenure as chancellor will end in less than a month. And four weeks before the election, hardly anyone seems to want to ask hard questions and uncover the breadth of the Afghanistan debacle. But this is what is urgently needed to draw the necessary conclusions for future operations. The Bundestag federal parliament could have used its meeting on Wednesday to set up a committee of inquiry, but it wasted this opportunity.

One of the results could have been the realization that the rapid collapse of Afghanistan was entirely foreseeable. France, for instance, flew its citizens and all forces it deemed worthy of protection out of the country a while ago — long before the outbreak of the current fiasco. Why did Paris succeed where Berlin failed?

Afghan refugees transfer to the United States after evacuation from Kabul at an Air Base in Germany — Photo: Airman Edgar Grimaldo/U.S. Air/ZUMA

The federal government will not answer that question. We only hope that until the end of her chancellorship, Merkel will at least stay away from the airy, fragrant phrases that have been music to her listeners' ears in recent months, but sounded like she did not really mean them. If she did, it would have translated into a much needed show of strength in the fight against the Taliban — from 2001 onwards.

Defense Minister Peter Struck erroneously stated at the time that Germany was preserving its security by intervening in the Hindu Kush mountain range, in the country's northeast region. All foreign and defense politicians later repeated this line. If it really were so, the army should return to the Hindu Kush as quickly as possible. Today the Taliban rule over more parts of Afghanistan than before the invasion of the Americans, British and Germans, some 20 years ago.

So where, indeed, is Germany's security? The question could be soon answered by the new German government, provided it is able to drain the swamp of empty phrases in foreign and defense policy. It doesn't even need the army to do that.

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Ideas

Shame On The García Márquez Heirs — Cashing In On The "Scraps" Of A Legend

A decision to publish a sketchy manuscript as a posthumous novel by the late Gabriel García Márquez would have horrified Colombia's Nobel laureate, given his painstaking devotion to the precision of the written word.

Photo of a window with a sticker of the face of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with butterfly notes at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Poster of Gabriel Garcia Marquez at Guadalajara's International Book Fair.

Juan David Torres Duarte

-Essay-

BOGOTÁ — When a writer dies, there are several ways of administering the literary estate, depending on the ambitions of the heirs. One is to exercise a millimetric check on any use or edition of the author's works, in the manner of James Joyce's nephew, Stephen, who inherited his literary rights. He refused to let even academic papers quote from Joyce's landmark novel, Ulysses.

Or, you continue to publish the works, making small additions to their corpus, as with Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett and Clarice Lispector, or none at all, which will probably happen with Milan Kundera and Cormac McCarthy.

Another way is to seek out every scrap of paper the author left and every little word that was jotted down — on a piece of cloth, say — and drip-feed them to publishers every two to three years with great pomp and publicity, to revive the writer's renown.

This has happened with the Argentine Julio Cortázar (who seems to have sold more books dead than alive), the French author Albert Camus (now with 200 volumes of personal and unfinished works) and with the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño. The latter's posthumous oeuvre is so abundant I am starting to wonder if his heirs haven't hired a ghost writer — typing and smoking away in some bedsit in Barcelona — to churn out "newly discovered" works.

Which group, I wonder, will our late, great novelist Gabriel García Márquez fit into?

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