Germany Goes Off Course: Files for the Taliban, Powers for the Intelligence Service

A man stands at the counter of the Afghan consulate in Bonn. He wants to renew his passport, because without valid papers, the ground beneath his feet in Germany starts to disappear. Sitting in front of him is an official working on behalf of the very government he once fled. The man used to work for the German military, and his name appears on lists he never wrote. Now he hands his fingerprint and address over to the people he tried to escape. He says nothing. A counter is a quiet place where biographies turn into forms, and whoever controls the forms gets to read the biography. When you lose your country, you lose more than a home - you lose the ground on which rights can be claimed in the first place.

The German government under Friedrich Merz is allowing Taliban representatives to work in Afghanistan's diplomatic missions in Berlin and Bonn. In return, Berlin gets more deportation flights to Kabul. The agreement was announced in October and expanded this summer: Germany is allowing additional Taliban staff into the country, and in exchange there are supposed to be as many as three deportation flights a month in the future. Germany is the first country in the European Union to allow officials of the regime to operate inside its diplomatic missions. Previously, those missions had been controlled by diplomats from the former government.

Merz told the Bundestag in June that Germany does not recognize the Taliban and is working with them only at the necessary technical level. The arrangement now in place tells a different story. Representatives of the regime are getting access to embassies and consulates. On top of that come diplomatic rights and a direct line to German authorities. When you give a regime official premises and channels of communication, you have recognized it, no matter what you insist before the full Bundestag.

The price is being paid somewhere else. Human rights organizations see around 35,000 Afghans as being at risk, people who came to Germany through humanitarian admission programs, among them human rights activists and former local staff of the German military. Many have to renew their passports and, of all places, must go to the very consulates where Taliban staff are now sitting. Another roughly 321,000 Afghans live in Germany as refugees or under some other form of protection. Activists warn that the regime could gain access to personal data through this work. Those who fled could once again become traceable and vulnerable to blackmail. A consulate is an archive. Whoever works there sees addresses and family relationships, and for someone who fled, their own family can become a means of pressure.

Hamid Nangialai Kabiri, der frühere Leiter des afghanischen Konsulats in Bonn, trat aus Protest gegen die Vereinbarung zurück. Er warnt, die Taliban könnten ihre neue Stellung nutzen, um Gegner auch in Deutschland einzuschüchtern und eigene Netze aufzubauen. Die Grünen-Abgeordnete Schahina Gambir wirft der Bundesregierung vor, sie habe sich selbst erpressbar gemacht und den Taliban durch die Hintertür eine Anerkennung verschafft, die diese offen nie erhalten hätten. Ihre Einwände treffen denselben Punkt: Wer Verfolgte verwaltet, gibt Verfolgern ein Werkzeug und macht den eigenen Staat angreifbar – das kleine Einmaleins der Diplomatie.

At the end of July, the next flight took off for Kabul with 31 Afghans on board. Since the Taliban takeover, Germany has now deported 204 people. For the first time, one of them was a man with no criminal record whom nobody had classified as a threat. A line has been crossed. A policy aimed at convicted criminals is turning into one that can hit anyone who has done nothing wrong. That is the grammar of a deportation policy increasingly modeled on the American version, where it has long since stopped being about what someone did and become about what passport they carry. The same bargain - admission in exchange for taking people back - is familiar from Washington as well: You deal with the regime you claim not to recognize because it agrees to take back the people you want gone. We see it every day, and in Germany people seem to underestimate a problem that has long since spread far beyond deportation policy alone. This hard line is being carried by public support. The government's poll numbers are falling, the AfD has gained sharply and is leading ahead of the election in Saxony-Anhalt, where it could enter government for the first time.

Whoever controls the data controls the people. In the same week, the same government decided to reorganize what its own intelligence services are allowed to know about people and what they are allowed to do. In Bonn, data changes hands, in Berlin, the rules do, and both are decided by the same hand.

The cabinet approved a sweeping reform of the intelligence services. The proposal from Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt of the CSU gives the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Intelligence Service powers that go far beyond observation. In the future, the services are not supposed to merely watch attackers, but fight them. They will be allowed to disrupt the other side's infrastructure and deliberately spread false information against it. During ongoing cyberattacks, they are supposed to be allowed to disable the attackers' systems. In a state of tension or defense and in situations involving particular threats, the BND would even be allowed to carry out sabotage abroad. The Bundestag still has to pass the reform; afterward, the Bundesrat can call on the Mediation Committee, but its approval is not required.

Die Begründung klingt nüchtern: außenpolitische Bedrohungen und vergleichbare Rechte befreundeter Dienste, hinter denen Deutschland bislang zurückstehe. „Wir machen aus unseren Nachrichtendiensten echte Geheimdienste“, sagte Dobrindt und nannte es höchste Zeit, sich auf Augenhöhe mit den Partnerdiensten aufzustellen. Man muss ihm einen Teil zugestehen. Wer die Reform rundweg ablehnt, verkennt, in welcher Zeit wir leben. Ein Land, das ausgespäht und angegriffen wird, muss sich wehren dürfen. Und doch hat der Satz von den echten Geheimdiensten in diesem Land ein Gewicht, das er anderswo nicht besäße. Kein Staat weiß besser, wozu eine gut geführte Kartei taugt, wenn sie in die falschen Hände gerät, und keiner hat den Weg von der Verwaltung zur Verfolgung gründlicher dokumentiert. Wo ausgerechnet hier von Erfahrung die Rede ist, liegt sie im Überfluss vor.

Anyone Who Asks Questions Will Soon Have to Justify It

Es passt auch ins Bild, dass die Bundesregierung nun das Informationsfreiheitsgesetz so weit beschneiden will, bis vom Recht nur noch die Hülle bleibt. Künftig soll der bislang voraussetzungslose Anspruch eingeschränkt und für Anfragen ein „berechtigtes Interesse“ verlangt werden. Genau über dieses Gesetz wurden bislang stille Geschäfte und fragwürdige Behördenentscheidungen sichtbar. Mehr als 100 Organisationen und Medien warnen darum vor einem schweren Rückschritt. Zugleich hält die EU-Kommission Deutschland vor, Journalisten bis heute kein eigenes, gesetzlich gesichertes Auskunftsrecht gegenüber Bundesbehörden zu geben. Man muss nur nach Washington sehen, wohin es führt, wenn ein Staat bestimmt, wer etwas erfahren darf. Ein Gemeinwesen, das die Frage verteuert, fürchtet die Antwort. Große Protestaktionen oder Demonstrationen blieben jedoch in Deutschland aus. Das ist durchaus auffällig angesichts der Tragweite der geplanten Änderungen.

More serious than the dispute over individual powers is the direction itself. A state that allows its intelligence services to deliberately spread false information is reaching for a tool whose use it is constantly condemning in others. Both agencies are also supposed to be allowed to launch cyberattacks themselves in order to alter or delete data. Marc Henrichmann of the CDU, chairman of the Parliamentary Oversight Panel, gives as an example the payment of hired operatives, which often runs through digital currencies. If the payment channel is interrupted, he says, the operative does not get paid and will not carry out the act. Originally, the Federal Office for Information Security was supposed to be required to report known vulnerabilities to the BND so that the intelligence service could use them for its own attacks. That provision was dropped after criticism. Each of these powers can be justified on its own. Taken together, they expand what an intelligence service is allowed to know about people before there is even any suspicion.

The BND will still remain far short of the powers held by foreign services such as the CIA, Mossad or France's DGSE. Even in the face of a concrete threat, it will still be barred from using violence against people abroad. But in the future, its personnel will no longer need explicit permission to carry weapons, which is intended for their own protection. What is expanding above all is what the services are allowed to know. They will be allowed to analyze huge volumes of data using artificial intelligence and compare biometric information with the open internet. The draft runs more than 730 pages. It regulates online searches and surveillance inside private homes, as well as the creation of movement profiles.

Oversight is supposed to be strengthened through the Independent Control Council, established in 2022 and bound only by law. In secret sessions of the Parliamentary Oversight Panel, it is supposed to brief lawmakers. The opposition says that is not enough. FDP leader Wolfgang Kubicki suggested that the new powers may be unconstitutional and called the weakened separation between intelligence services and police a breach of a taboo. FDP Secretary General Martin Hagen called it a disastrous sign. Green Party lawmaker Konstantin von Notz says more robust powers are justified, but the ones being proposed go too far. Oversight, however, rarely grows as quickly as power does. A council bound only by law is only as strong as the access it is given.

Two decisions, one project, one question. The state decides whom it protects and whom it makes visible. In Bonn, it hands the name of someone who fled to the regime he fled from. In Berlin, it gives itself the right to know more and strike back. Reforming the intelligence services was overdue, and that can be said plainly. But power is not measured by the justification for it, but by the hands it falls into, and this country should recognize both of those movements from its own history. Whether a state that leaves its most vulnerable people seeking protection exposed to the reach of their persecutors is the right recipient for this much new power over data remains the question nobody in the cabinet asked out loud.