Word: missioners
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...Social Democrats of Frank-Walter Steinmeier remain committed to Berlin's 4,000-strong troop deployment in Afghanistan as part of the multinational force there. But Die Linke, a smaller, left-wing party, has won support by campaigning on an immediate withdrawal, and as public support for the Afghanistan mission falls even the mainstream leaders are having to take notice. Steinmeier has recently hinted that he would pull troops out by 2013, though in a pre-election debate with Merkel he hedged his bets, saying that he merely wanted to "create the conditions" by 2013 so a "withdrawal could begin...
Back then the mission seemed clear-cut and justified: to rid Afghanistan of a cruel, women-hating regime whose control over the country created a safe haven for a terrorist group that threatened the West. Even when they squabbled with Washington over Iraq, countries such as France and Germany stayed firm on Afghanistan. But public support has fallen over the years, and especially in the past 12 months. An August poll by French daily Le Figaro found that just 36% backed France's military's presence in Afghanistan. In July, a Forsa poll for German magazine Stern found that...
...festival has another mission, beyond showing left-leaning films to left-leaning audiences. It wants the world to know that Hollywood's Oscar season does not begin at the much larger Toronto Film Festival, held a week later than Venice. It starts right here. Clooney's Goats, a kooky satire about U.S. soldiers in Iraq who've been trained as "psychic spies," is unlikely to get much attention at the Academy Awards; nor is Cage's work in Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, though the star's intensity as a ? cop deranged by painkillers...
...important to tell the "true stories of what's going on. Both the setbacks and the achievements." As Prime Minister of Denmark until last April, Rasmussen went out of his way to explain the reasons Danish troops were in Afghanistan. As a consequence, he says, support for the mission has held up better in Denmark than elsewhere. The British might learn a lesson from that. Gordon Brown has frequently tried to explain the Afghanistan mission. But David Davis, a prominent opposition MP and a former Foreign Office minister, argues that public support has dropped because of a "lack of clarity...
...Mission Creep Nowhere is the task less clear to the average voter than in Germany. Successive German leaders have sold the country's troop deployment as nation-building, not combat. But as the oil-tanker episode proved, mission creep is hard to avoid when the enemy starts attacking you. German involvement in Afghanistan was snuck "past people," Jurgen Trittin, the foreign policy spokesman for the Greens, recently argued. Now, with the Taliban moving into the once peaceful north, where most of Germany's troops are stationed, Germans have to face the fact that their military - a force that...