Risky Choices. The framing of Germany's policy options in Afghanistan, 2001-2010

Contemporary international security governance, mainly organized through multinational institutions or coalitions to manage multi-layered security risks, has become increasingly complex and uncertain. Under these circumstances, communicating competing security policy options to a prudent democratic public turns into a pivotal challenge for all political actors involved. A prominent case in point has been the International Security Assistance Force (or ISAF) in Afghanistan, where a failure to explain the objectives, strategies and risks has spurred strong public opposition in many contributing nations. Some of the most heated debates around the Afghanistan endeavor were led in Germany, where traditionally engagements in multinational peace operations enjoy broad domestic support. Although there is no shortage of trenchant diagnoses of Germany's engagement in Afghanistan and the alleged untruthfulness of the political elites about the goals as well as about the risks of the operation, a systematic analysis of the political discourse at key decision points during Germany's Afghanistan mission is still lacking. To address this gap in the literature, this study analyzes the domestic discourse on Germany's Afghanistan operation in the dynamic political context of the years 2001 to 2010, focusing on the communicative framing of the objectives and risks of the Afghanistan operation by members of the German government, the parliamentary opposition and in the mass media. The analysis shows that risk and uncertainty played an important role in the official communication of Germany's Afghanistan policy. However, they were mainly depicted as exogenous factors that effective policy-making could reduce or eliminate. Yet, the same actors largely denied that future negative consequences could also result from decisions to prolong or intensify German engagement in Afghanistan. In accordance with the proposition of Prospect Theory, the proponents of Germany's engagement in Afghanistan strongly relied on negative framing strategies to convince the public of the necessity to extend and expand the operation. Especially in the later years, when Germany was already deeply involved in Afghan affairs and domestic disapproval grew, sunk cost arguments and worst case scenarios were heavily employed. On the other side, the analysis also reveals that important democratic counterweights to the government were only able to fill in the gaps in the government's communication to a certain degree. In many respects, the framing of ISAF by the parliamentary opposition and the media resembled the government's communication. Like the government, the parliamentary opposition and newspaper editors rarely compared the risks of the reversal of Germany's Afghanistan policy to the risks of the policy's continuation. These findings call into question the one-sided criticism of the executive communication strategies employed during the Afghanistan operation that can be observed in much of the existing literature and media editorials on the topic. At the same time, the findings highlight the necessity for an understanding of political communication that reflects the complexities and uncertainties of contemporary security policies.