I guess a source on the Afghanistan polls would be a good start.
The blue line (34% in Sep 07)says how many want our troops to stay in Iraq, the red one how many say they should withdraw.
The results are sometimes published in journals, the source institute Infratest dimap does the poll quite often with the same questions, but doesn't publish all results for an easy access like this one.
The Spiegel published these Infratest dimap numbers in IIRC February 08:
"Should the Bundeswehr continue to be stationed in Afghanistan?"
yes: 42% no: 55%
"Should the Bundeswehr do combat missions in Afghanistan like other nations' troops do?"
yes: 13% no: 86%
The navy is still at the coastline of Lebanon (pointless) and Somalia (blocking AQ - pointless as well. But it comes handy due to the recent pirate activity. The frigate has collected lots of intel on the situation there before the piracy problem erupted).
The present numbers of soldiers in so-called "out-of-area" missions is always up-to-date here:
http://www.bundeswehr.de/portal/a/bw...lVRS82X0NfNDJE
Actually, I forgot to mention a handful of Tornados that are now included in OEF as well.
Germany's trade with many nations is very "robust". We export and import extremely much (especially in comparison to GNP,see the CIA World Factbook for some easy statistics), and our balance surplus is a quite unknown problem.
Trade with Russia is sometimes in the news because natural gas sources are not diversified enough. We get too much natural gas from Russia.
Photovoltaic power; well, the other solar power technologies work with direct radiation, photovoltaic power works with scattered solar radiation as well. That's why we're looking at it: Because of our clouds.
Tornados. Well, every country has at least one ####ty newspaper, I guess.
But I've got something more interesting. Yesterday we had a cloud over parts of Western Germany that dropped not only an unbelievable volume of water - it also darkened whole regions like an eclipse. I had 10m sight range at 11 o'clock in the morning!
The PRT in Northern Afghanistan is outside of the originally allowed mission and it required quite some discussions to set it up with originally 42 men (with new parliament's mandate). It looks successful (although it had some troubles with harassing fires that stopped only when additional infantry began to patrol the area. There were also some IED/RPG attacks.)
I don't know much about its activities - Afghanistan news are very rare in Germany anyway and I'm out of uniform since some years. I saw a NGO-made map about deterioration/improvement of travel safety in Afghanistan which highlighted the Kunduz and Kabul regions as (almost) the only two regions with major improvements IIRC.
I personally consider the Afghan war as a civil war and don't think that we need to participate.
P.S.: I'm sorry about the many typos in the opening post. I used a browser without spelling check...
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