BERLIN — Germany’s leaders don’t officially recognize the Taliban government in Afghanistan, but that’s not stopping them from dealing with the pariah regime to get something they badly want.
As Germany and other EU states intensify their migration crackdowns, European leaders are examining ways to deport Afghan migrants to Afghanistan in large numbers. In return for the Taliban’s cooperation, Germany in particular is providing the regime — which is formally recognised only by Moscow — some of what it most craves internationally: legitimacy.
Germany is leading the charge within the EU to establish ties to the Taliban government — and its leaders believe other European nations are likely to follow. The push comes as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservatives, under political pressure from the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, have repeatedly vowed to deport more migrants, including Afghans, who form the second-largest group of asylum seekers in Germany after Syrians.
The lack of diplomatic relations with the Taliban, however, has until now been an impediment to Merz’s plans, forcing his government to take an unprecedented step.
“We will very soon have an agreement in place that will allow us to regularly repatriate people to Afghanistan on scheduled flights,” German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said earlier this month. Officials from his ministry have held “technical talks with the authorities in Kabul” to achieve this, he added.
At first, Germany intends to deport Afghans committed of crimes, according to Dobrindt. Beyond this, however, the government has left open the possibility of deporting Afghans in Germany without protected status.
Merz’s government has already arranged one deportation flight to Afghanistan, sending 81 Afghans convicted of crimes to the country this summer. The government of his predecessor, former Chancellor Olaf Scholz, also carried out one such flight last year, making Germany the first European country to deport a large group of Afghans to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Both flights were arranged with Qatari officials acting as intermediaries. Now, Merz’s government is moving to deal directly with the Taliban to increase the number of flights. As part of those dealings — and in order to coordinate future deportations — German authorities have allowed Taliban representatives to serve in Afghan consulates in the country, making Germany the first EU country to do so.
Others may follow.
“The repatriations we have carried out to Afghanistan are of great interest to many other countries,” Dobrindt said during a summer summit with his European counterparts in Copenhagen, adding they had discussed “who would like to join in, and whether and how this would be possible.”
Austria and Belgium are among the EU nations pointing to Berlin’s approach as a model. The German government is a “guiding light” with regard to its approach on migration, including plans to deport Afghans convicted of crimes, Anneleen Van Bossuyt, Belgium’s migration minister, wrote in a statement.
Belgium, she added, wants to make use of Germany’s ties to the Taliban in order to organize joint deportation flights.
“We also have to talk to regimes that we do not support,” Van Bossuyt said.
Germany’s new Realpolitik
Merz’s government is increasingly seeking to lead an anti-immigration front within Europe, sharply pivoting from past policies that made Germany the European country most receptive to asylum seekers, particularly during the reign of Angela Merkel, the former conservative chancellor.
But Merz’s conservatives now blame those generous policies for the rise of the far-right AfD, now the largest opposition party in the German parliament. In some polls the AfD now surpasses Merz’s conservatives as the most popular party in the country.
The stark shift is resulting in a new German Realpolitik on immigration that, until relatively recently, would have been virtually unthinkable. Germany’s dealings with the Taliban are a prime example, including the welcoming of two Taliban representatives to be “integrated into the Afghan consular administration in Germany,” as a German government spokesperson put it.
For the Taliban government, the arrival of Taliban officials in consulates in Germany marks a clear victory. Despite the Taliban seizure of power in 2021, Afghan consulates and embassies have largely remained in the hands of Western-oriented Afghan officials who were part of the former Afghan government. Taliban officials now have an interest in seeing such consulates taken over or shut down.
Experts say the Taliban government likely views the admission of consular staff into Germany as a first step toward gaining more sway — and that Taliban officials are likely to demand additional concessions from Germany in return for their cooperation on deportations.
“The Taliban have a long history in their international engagements of getting something and then demanding more,” said William Maley, an emeritus professor at the Australian National University and an expert on Afghanistan. “The German government will probably get its fingers burned on this.”
Conquering the consulates
The Taliban have thus far spoken positively of their new cooperation with the German government.
A spokesperson for the Taliban-controlled Afghan interior ministry, Abdul Mateen Qani, told German public broadcaster ARD earlier this month that talks with a high-ranking German official on the subject of deportations had gone well and had taken place in a pleasant atmosphere. At the same time, Qani said, his government was prepared to deal sternly with Afghans convicted of crimes abroad.
“Afghan citizens who commit crimes in other countries are, of course, personally responsible for their actions, but they also represent the Afghan nation,” said Qani. Upon arriving in Afghanistan, he added, the deportees are dealt with by the Afghan interior ministry “according to Sharia law.”
Human rights groups and the United Nations have sharply criticized Germany for the deportation plans. “Sending people back to a country in which they are at risk of persecution, torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment or other irreparable harm, violates the core international law principle of ‘non-refoulement,’” a U.N. spokesperson said in July.
But some advocates say there are dangers for Afghan dissidents more broadly now that the Taliban have established a foothold in Germany’s Afghan consulates.
“It is very dangerous,” Hamid Nangialay Kabiri, who served as the head of the Afghan consulate in Bonn from 2019 until this September, told POLITICO. Kabiri, who resigned with the consulate’s entire staff in protest at the arrival of a Taliban official, said the office is of special interest to the Taliban regime because the biometric data of Afghan citizens residing in over 20 countries is stored there as well as personal information on people evacuated through resettlement and humanitarian programs in Europe, Canada and the United States.
By accessing this data, the Taliban can find information about where opponents of the regime reside, including information about their families still in Afghanistan, according to Kabiri.
When asked about concerns over Taliban access to those records, the German foreign ministry responded to POLITICO with a written statement. “The German government has an interest in ensuring that the Afghan diplomatic missions in Germany remain operational and that Afghan nationals in Germany receive adequate consular services, including the issuance of travel documents.”
Taliban officials, meanwhile, are pressing ahead with their takeover of diplomatic missions in Germany. In Berlin, the officials plan to soon raise the white and black flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, reinstated by the Taliban when they came to power four years ago.
The post Germany spearheads drive to legitimize Taliban in exchange for migrant deportations appeared first on Politico.
