The former German chancellor was the last witness to testify before a parliamentary inquiry committee on the German military's role in the Western withdrawal from Afghanistan during the Taliban's takeover of Kabul in 2021.
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Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a parliamentary inquiry on Thursday that the hasty withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan in 2021 was "a terrible failure".
Merkel was chancellor in August 2021, when Western powers withdrew their forces from Afghanistan in a chaotic exit culminating in a suicide attack at Kabul airport which killed over 170 civilians and 13 US soldiers.
During the session in front of the inquiry committee, which is investigating the German military's role in the withdrawal, Merkel described how she returned to Berlin from her summer vacation on 13 August 2021 and was briefed by her staff about the escalating situation in Kabul.
The next morning, she said, she gave her defence minister the green light to evacuate some 5,000 German forces stationed in the country. A day later, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled Kabul as Taliban forces surrounded the city.
When asked if the German government had prepared for such an event, Merkel responded that Ghani's decision to flee "surprised us all, including the Americans".
"We were not prepared on Saturday that Afghanistan would be without a president the next day," she said.
The former chancellor was critical of Ghani, who left with his wife for Uzbekistan. Merkel compared him unfavourably to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who remained in Ukraine despite Russia's full-scale invasion of his country in February 2022.
'We had taken on too much'
Merkel conceded that the international community had to admit it "failed" on other goals in Afghanistan, from supporting the rule of law to upholding women's rights.
"We had taken on too much," she said, describing the idea of creating a new community aligned with Western ideals in the country as "presumptuous".
Among the causes of failure, Merkel said, were nepotism, corruption, drug trafficking and a general lack of cultural understanding. She added that the influence of Pakistan and the country's general geopolitical situation was probably not assessed precisely enough prior to Germany's participation in the original military intervention.
However, Merkel stopped short of fully condemning the US-led venture in Afghanistan, saying that it was "in retrospect correct" that Germany supported the US after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre on 11 September, 2001.
She added that at the time, the hope that a Western military operation in the country would quash a terrorist threat was "well founded".
US President Joe Biden has been heavily criticised for his role in the 2021 withdrawal, with critics arguing he failed to order an effective civilian evacuation plan and emboldened the Taliban who gained control of the entire country.
Biden has argued that a prior agreement made under former US President Donald Trump with the Taliban — a deal that promised the withdrawal of US forces within 14 months — left him with very few alternative options while also releasing thousands of Taliban fighters with enough time for them to organise for a sweep back to power.
The inquiry in Germany was established to investigate the German military's role in the withdrawal. Over two years it has questioned 111 witnesses, of which Merkel is the final one.