Starting Points: Germany

Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts

Jun 2, 2010

Smaller euro nations trail Germany's 'locomotive'

Image by net_efekt via Flickr

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 2, 2010; A10

BAD MUNSTER-EBERNBERG, GERMANY -- Buy a bottle of champagne and it puts money in the pocket of Schneider and Co., a family-owned manufacturer that from a remote perch in the German countryside has created a global monopoly on the wire cages that secure the corks on sparkling wine.

Obscure in a country of marquee exporters such as Mercedes-Benz and Siemens, the company's international focus is common among small and often family-owned firms in Germany.

Schneider's highly automated plants here and in Italy, Spain and Brazil churn out 2 billion of the devices a year. Its dominant market share -- amassed over 30 years -- helps explain Germany's complex and controversial role in the European economy.

The nation's $200 billion annual trade surplus has been blamed as one cause of the current crisis -- Germany is cast as an industrial powerhouse drawing wealth from economically weaker nations like Greece with which it shares a currency. But conversations with economists and business people and an analysis of trade statistics paint a more complex picture of trade patterns that predate the euro by decades, and they show a German business culture organized around selling outside its borders.

German companies "follow a very conservative approach," said Thomas Kraus, Schneider's chief executive. "We are happy to have a small profit, but a sustainable profit, a long-term profit. We have to go outside because the domestic market is limited."

Calls have grown for Germany to "rebalance" -- to buy more from struggling European neighbors so they can keep more money at home. German officials including Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble have been adamant that it is better to be Europe's "locomotive" than its open-wallet patron.

Euro anxiety

Germany's export success may in fact be difficult to replicate or -- in the case of eurozone nations like Greece -- reverse in the near term.

"If you look at the volumes of exports and imports over the years, it has intensified," said Helge Berger, deputy chief of the division in charge of European policy at the International Monetary Fund. "But it is a very old pattern. The euro is a continuation rather than a structural break."

As Greece stumbled toward a possible default on its government debt, the structure of the eurozone was cited as putting the country at a disadvantage. It has also sparked anxiety of a renewed global crisis. Without a national currency, Greece as well as larger debt-ridden economies such as Spain lack an important tool -- the ability to devalue their money and make their goods cheaper and more competitive. Germany is seen as the flip side of that equation -- the industrial powerhouse that profits by drawing money from European countries caught in the orbit of the common currency.

But eurozone countries like Greece and Spain have run trade deficits with Germany since at least 1980 -- 20 years before the euro was established -- while a handful, like Ireland and the Netherlands, have trade surpluses with Germany. In one case, the countries serve as a large internal market for German manufactured goods and automobiles; in the other, they have profited by attracting German capital and business.

Global strategy

Talk to German businessmen and the conversation inevitably turns global -- a treatise into what supplies come from which countries, where finished products end up, and how niche manufacturing can support an industry.

On the factory line at Nord Micro, workers take material from the United States, Mexico and Israel to make parts for the climate-control systems that go into Boeing and Airbus passenger jets, said Bjorn Kranz, a purchasing agent for the company. The drop in the value of the euro might make him look in eurozone countries for parts, he said, but his real focus is whether factories in Poland can make some of the more-advanced pieces he needs.

"It is going more towards Eastern Europe because of the prices," he said.

According to IMF statistics, since the introduction of the euro in 1999, Germany's trade surplus with the rest of the world has grown faster than its surplus with the other eurozone countries -- and faster still with European nations that have not adopted the euro.

Some of Germany's most dramatic trade growth has been with the East European nations, like Poland, that opened themselves to market capitalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall -- a development that Germans were well positioned to exploit.

Trade between Germany and the former Czechoslovakia, for example, was a few billion dollars annually before the country was dissolved in 1992. Trade between Germany and the Czech Republic grew to more than $80 billion in 2008. Trade with Slovakia, which recently adopted the euro, is around $20 billion and last year provided Germany with a $1 billion surplus. The Czech Republic and Slovakia both joined the European Union in 2004.

In the United States, increasing exports -- a way to generate jobs from another country's cash -- is among the Obama administration's top economic priorities. It is encouraging smaller companies to look outside the domestic market -- or move beyond exporting to a single supplier in a single country, a practice U.S. trade officials say they have noticed among American firms.

For Axel Schramm, who has helped turn the upholstery and saddle-making shop created by his grandfather into a luxury mattress and bedding company, exports account for about 40 percent of his business. Most of those sales are to European countries, though the company is testing markets in Hong Kong, Japan and elsewhere for made-to-order, hand-assembled mattresses that start at around $5,000.

Unlike U.S. companies, Schramm said, German firms don't have a continent-size domestic market for their goods. So they have created one abroad, working the trade fairs and interior design shows and carefully picking sales agents.

"We don't have the power of a big company to start in a new country," he said at the showroom attached to the Schramm factory, where 100 employees produce about 7,000 mattresses a year, hand-fitting the metal springs into sleeves and sewing on the high-end coverings. "You have to work to find people in the right markets in the right place."

Apr 19, 2010

Google - Controversial Content and Free Expression on the Web

Image via Wikipedia

Two and a half years ago, we outlined our approach to removing content from Google products and services. Our process hasn’t changed since then, but our recent decision to stop censoring search on Google.cn has raised new questions about when we remove content, and how we respond to censorship demands by governments. So we figured it was time for a refresher.

Censorship of the web is a growing problem. According to the Open Net Initiative, the number of governments that censor has grown from about four in 2002 to over 40 today. In fact, some governments are now blocking content before it even reaches their citizens. Even benign intentions can result in the specter of real censorship. Repressive regimes are building firewalls and cracking down on dissent online -- dealing harshly with anyone who breaks the rules.

Increased government censorship of the web is undoubtedly driven by the fact that record numbers of people now have access to the Internet, and that they are creating more content than ever before. For example, over 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day. This creates big challenges for governments used to controlling traditional print and broadcast media. While everyone agrees that there are limits to what information should be available online -- for example child pornography -- many of the new government restrictions we are seeing today not only strike at the heart of an open Internet but also violate Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

We see these attempts at control in many ways. China is the most polarizing example, but it is not the only one. Google products -- from search and Blogger to YouTube and Google Docs -- have been blocked in 25 of the 100 countries where we offer our services. In addition, we regularly receive government requests to restrict or remove content from our properties. When we receive those requests, we examine them to closely to ensure they comply with the law, and if we think they’re overly broad, we attempt to narrow them down. Where possible, we are also transparent with our users about what content we have been required to block or remove so they understand that they may not be getting the full picture.

On our own services, we deal with controversial content in different ways, depending on the product. As a starting point, we distinguish between search (where we are simply linking to other web pages), the content we host, and ads. In a nutshell, here is our approach:

Search is the least restrictive of all our services, because search results are a reflection of the content of the web. We do not remove content from search globally except in narrow circumstances, like child pornography, certain links to copyrighted material, spam, malware, and results that contain sensitive personal information like credit card numbers. Specifically, we don’t want to engage in political censorship. This is especially true in countries like China and Vietnam that do not have democratic processes through which citizens can challenge censorship mandates. We carefully evaluate whether or not to establish a physical presence in countries where political censorship is likely to happen.

Some democratically-elected governments in Europe and elsewhere do have national laws that prohibit certain types of content. Our policy is to comply with the laws of these democratic governments -- for example, those that make pro-Nazi material illegal in Germany and France -- and remove search results from only our local search engine (for example, www.google.de in Germany). We also comply with youth protection laws in countries like Germany by removing links to certain material that is deemed inappropriate for children or by enabling Safe Search by default, as we do in Korea. Whenever we do remove content, we display a message for our users that X number of results have been removed to comply with local law and we also report those removals to chillingeffects.org, a project run by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which tracks online restrictions on speech.

Platforms that host content like Blogger, YouTube, and Picasa Web Albums have content policies that outline what is, and is not, permissible on those sites. A good example of content we do not allow is hate speech. Our enforcement of these policies results in the removal of more content from our hosted content platforms than we remove from Google Search. Blogger, as a pure platform for expression, is among the most open of our services, allowing for example legal pornography, as long as it complies with the Blogger Content Policy. YouTube, as a community intended to permit sharing, comments, and other user-to-user interactions, has its Community Guidelines that define its own rules of the road. For example, pornography is absolutely not allowed on YouTube.

We try to make it as easy as possible for users to flag content that violates our policies. Here’s a video explaining how flagging works on YouTube. We review flagged content across all our products 24 hours a day, seven days a week to remove offending content from our sites. And if there are local laws where we do business that prohibit content that would otherwise be allowed, we restrict access to that content only in the country that prohibits it. For example, in Turkey, videos that insult the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Ataturk, are illegal. Two years ago, we were notified of such content on YouTube and blocked those videos in Turkey that violated local law. A Turkish court subsequently demanded that we block them globally, which we refused to do, arguing that Turkish law cannot apply outside Turkey. As a result YouTube has been blocked there.

Finally, our ads products have the most restrictive policies, because they are commercial products intended to generate revenue.

These policies are always evolving. Decisions to allow, restrict or remove content from our services and products often require difficult judgment calls. We have spirited debates about the right course of action, whether it’s about our own content policies or the extent to which we resist a government request. In the end, we rely on the principles that sit at the heart of everything we do.

We’ve said them before, but in these particularly challenging times, they bear repeating: We have a bias in favor of people's right to free expression. We are driven by a belief that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual.

Posted by Rachel Whetstone, Vice President, Global Communications and Public Affairs

Feb 28, 2010

Germany's frugality bemoaned for inhibiting euro zone growth

By Anthony Faiola
Sunday, February 28, 2010; A08

BERLIN -- Greek extravagance touched off the biggest crisis in the 11-year history of the euro. But the world's most ambitious monetary union faces a less obvious problem that might be even harder to lick -- German frugality.

Adoption of the euro a decade ago ushered in an era of cheap credit, soaring salaries and big government in nations like Greece, Spain and Portugal. Their debt-fueled splurges are now coming home to roost, with Greece the first to come close to running out of cash to operate the government, raising fears of a default. Germany -- Europe's economic powerhouse -- is expected to take a leading role in a rescue effort to prevent a possible run on the euro and the outbreak of a new bout of turmoil in global bond, currency and stock markets.

Southern European profligacy is now the target of open distain in Germany, with many here ruing the day in 1999 that this nation of 82 million kissed goodbye to the once-mighty deutsche mark.

Yet in the years since, a significant part of economic growth in Germany, analysts say, was fueled by a surge of spending in Greece, Spain, Portugal and other European nations after they adopted the euro. In fact, a jump in sales of everything from BMW sedans to Miele washing machines in other parts of Europe helped make up for the lack of spending here in Germany -- where stagnant wages and a culture of conservative consumers has led to years of anemic domestic demand.

A growing number of economists now say that must change to ensure the euro's survival. If Greece must slash spending and put its books in order to restore faith in the euro, then Germans must also begin to consume more of what Germany and its neighbors manufacture.

The economic imbalances in Europe underscore a broader global problem, the solving of which President Obama and others have called key to laying a path to sustained growth in the wake of the financial crisis. They argue that nations like Germany, China and Japan must do more to open the wallets of their consumers, who have some of the highest savings rates in the world, just as nations like United States, Britain and Greece must begin to export more while weaning themselves off the kind of credit-fueled spending sprees that have generated the economic bubbles of recent years.

A culture of thriftiness

That won't be easy.

Like many Germans, Rosi Wicher, 40, a preschool teacher and single mother of one, got minimal wage increases over the last decade, with aggressive cost-cutting by German companies and government policies holding the line on private- and public-sector salaries.

And like many of her peers in this shabby chic capital where ostentation is frowned upon, she prides herself on being thrifty. She has used the same stereo set for 12 years, runs no credit card debt, does not own a car and happily gets by with furniture purchased back in the 1980s. "Why do I need more?" she asked. "My child is happy with a DS Lite instead of a PlayStation. And my stereo still works fine. It don't think it's a sign of progress to run yourself into debt."

As a result of lopsided trade, Germany now enjoys a relationship with its partners in the euro not unlike that of China and the United States, with one acting as supplier and financier and the other as an overextended buyer. Over the past decade, Germany -- which now has the world's largest trade surplus after Saudi Arabia -- saw sales to Greece, Spain and Portugal soar 66 percent, 59 percent and 30 percent, respectively. Just as China is the major holder of U.S. Treasurys, German banks have also invested heavily in Greek, Spanish and Portuguese debt. But Germany imported relatively little from those nations in return -- partly, many here point out, because those countries still have relatively little to sell.

In the meantime, Germany is in a tight fix -- loath to reward feckless Greece with a concrete promise of aid but fearful of the consequences to its own economy if it does not.

"The Germans were catering a big party that was going on in the euro area, selling the food and offering the credit to the party guests," said Thomas Mayer, chief economist for Deutsche Bank. "But the guests got drunk and ate too much, and now Germany is stuck with the bill. What this tells us is that the euro model must be adjusted. Yes, the Greeks are going to have to make reforms, but the Germans are going to have to change, too."

Indignation over Greece

In recent years, Germany has made painful cuts in social services even as countries like Greece had an explosion in government spending. Not surprisingly, resentment is running high here, with polls showing almost 70 percent of Germans opposing a Greek bailout even though most analysts believe it would be a German-led intervention involving other European nations and/or a consortium of banks.

Indignation only heightened as Greece's deputy prime minister, responding to German calls for deeper spending cuts, suggested last week that instead of criticizing its policies, Germany should compensate Greece for the Nazi invasion of 1941.

"There were always great skeptics of the euro in Germany, now those forces are strengthening, and gathering more support," said Frank Schaeffler, a lawmaker from the Free Democratic Party, part of Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition. Asked whether the Greek crisis has made him drop his own support for the euro, Schaeffler said, "no, but I think it is clear we let the wrong countries join."

Analysts note that when the euro was launched, nations like Greece were expected to see a boost in salaries and spending as they played catch-up to their richer cousins, like Germany. But if the Greeks overshot, Germany, some economists contend, may have fallen short.

Especially over the past decade, German manufacturers -- already juggernauts of industry -- became some of the most globally competitive companies. Just as American firms did, they turned to outsourcing and overseas production hubs. They kept salaries down at home, with average wages stagnating in Germany for a decade. Germany still has no uniform minimum wage, and aggressive cost-cutting has resulted in more and more Germans laboring in temporary or contract jobs with lower pay and less job security.

The Germans have taken some steps to boost domestic demand. The government temporarily spurred consumer spending during the economic crisis, for instance, with a cash-for-clunkers program that was later copied by the Obama administration. But analysts note that such moves have been offset by hikes in the value-added tax, which acts as a sort of national sales tax and drives prices higher.

German officials bristle at the suggestion that their country is too dependent on foreign markets, or that taxpayers here are not doing enough to sustain the economy in the euro zone. They note that German tourists flock to Greek resorts in summer, and that Germany has funneled hundreds of millions of euros into European Union development funds that get spent on projects in the smaller European economies.

Joining the global culture of debt, many here say, is simply not an answer.

"There are two sides of the coin here. The first side is that if people spend a little more, they would help the economy to recover, and that's definitely a fact," said Joe Kaeser, chief financial officer for Siemens, one Germany's largest exporters and a global powerhouse with 400,000 employees worldwide, including 64,000 in the United States. "But companies have a responsibility to get into the consumer's wallet, and they have not been providing the right solutions and the right products. But I think we also have to say that there are some countries [where consumers] have spent too much."

Oct 27, 2009

German Limits on War Face Afghan Reality - NYTimes.com

By NICHOLAS KULISH

Published: October 26, 2009

KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — Forced to confront the rising insurgency in once peaceful northern Afghanistan, the German Army is engaged in sustained and bloody ground combat for the first time since World War II.

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A German soldier stands guard in a compound in Kunduz Province. Two men from his company were killed in June, among 36 German soldiers who have died in the Afghan war. More Photos »

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Soldiers near the northern city of Kunduz have had to strike back against an increasingly fierce campaign by Taliban insurgents, while carrying the burden of being among the first units to break the German taboo against military combat abroad that arose after the Nazi era.

At issue are how long opposition in Germany will allow its troops to stay and fight, and whether they will be given leeway from their strict rules of engagement to pursue the kind of counterinsurgency being advocated by American generals. The question now is whether the Americans will ultimately fight one kind of war and their allies another.

For Germans, the realization that their soldiers are now engaged in ground offensives in an open-ended and escalating war requires a fundamental reconsideration of their principles.

After World War II, German society rejected using military power for anything other than self-defense, and pacifism has been a rallying cry for generations, blocking allied requests for any military support beyond humanitarian assistance.

German leaders have chipped away at the proscriptions in recent years, in particular by participating in airstrikes in the Kosovo war. Still, the legacy of the combat ban remains in the form of strict engagement rules and an ingrained shoot-last mentality that is causing significant tensions with the United States in Afghanistan.

Driven by necessity, some of the 4,250 German soldiers here, the third-largest number of troops in the NATO contingent, have already come a long way. Last Tuesday, they handed out blankets, volleyballs and flashlights as a goodwill gesture to residents of the village of Yanghareq, about 22 miles northwest of Kunduz. Barely an hour later, insurgents with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades ambushed other members of the same company.

The Germans fought back, killing one of the attackers, before the dust and disorder made it impossible to tell fleeing Taliban from civilians.

“They shoot at us and we shoot back,” said Staff Sgt. Erik S., who, according to German military rules, could not be fully identified. “People are going to fall on both sides. It’s as simple as that. It’s war.”

The sergeant added, “The word ‘war’ is growing louder in society, and the politicians can’t keep it secret anymore.”

Indeed, German politicians have refused to utter the word, trying instead to portray the mission in Afghanistan as a mix of peacekeeping and reconstruction in support of the Afghan government. But their line has grown less tenable as the insurgency has expanded rapidly in the west and north of the country, where Germany leads the regional command and provides a majority of the troops.

The Germans may not have gone to war, but now the war has come to them.

In part, NATO and German officials say, that is evidence of the political astuteness of Taliban and Qaeda leaders, who are aware of the opposition in Germany to the war. They hope to exploit it and force the withdrawal of German soldiers — splintering the NATO alliance in the process — through attacks on German personnel in Afghanistan and through video and audio threats of terrorist attacks on the home front before the German elections last month.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the senior American and allied commander in Afghanistan, is pressing NATO allies to contribute more troops to the war effort, even as countries like the Netherlands and Canada have begun discussing plans to pull out. Germany has held out against pleas for additional troops so far.

Ties between Germany and the United States were strained last month over a German-ordered bombing of two hijacked tanker trucks, which killed civilians as well as Taliban. Many Germans, from top politicians down to enlisted men, thought that General McChrystal was too swift to condemn the strike before a complete investigation.

Germany’s combat troops are caught in the middle. In interviews last week, soldiers from the Third Company, Mechanized Infantry Battalion 391, said they were understaffed for the increasingly complex mission here. Two men from the company were killed in June, among 36 German soldiers who have died in the Afghan war.

The soldiers expressed frustration over the second-guessing of the airstrike not only by allies, but also by their own politicians, and over the absence of support back home.

While the intensity of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan’s south has received most attention, the situation in the Germans’ part of the north has deteriorated rapidly. Soldiers said that just a year ago they could patrol in unarmored vehicles. Now there are places where they cannot move even in armored vehicles without an entire company of soldiers.

American officials have argued that an emphasis on reconstruction, peacekeeping and the avoidance of violence may have given the Taliban a foothold to return to the north.

German officers here said they had adjusted their tactics accordingly, often engaging the Taliban in firefights for hours with close air support. In July, 300 German soldiers joined the Afghan Army and National Police in an operation in Kunduz Province that killed more than 20 Taliban fighters and led to the arrests of half a dozen more.

The German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the operation “a fundamental transition out of the defensive and into the offensive.”

Germany’s military actions are controlled by a parliamentary mandate, which is up for renewal in December. The German contingent has unarmed drones and Tornado fighter jets, which are restricted to reconnaissance and are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.

German soldiers usually stay in Afghanistan for just four months, which can make it difficult to maintain continuity with their Afghan partners. The mandate also caps the number of troops in the country at 4,500.

A NATO official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, called the mandate “a political straitjacket.”

A company of German paratroopers in the district of Chahar Darreh, where insurgent activity is particularly pronounced, fought off a series of attacks and stayed in the area, patrolling on foot and meeting with local elders for eight days and seven nights.

“The longer we were out there, the better the local population responded to us,” said Capt. Thomas K., the company’s commander. Another company relieved them for three days but then abandoned the position, where intelligence said that a bomb was waiting for the next group of German soldiers.

“Since we were there, no other company has been back,” the captain said.

Stefan Pauly contributed reporting from Berlin.

Oct 19, 2009

Flow of terrorist recruits increasing - washingtonpost.com

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Westerners attending camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan despite successful U.S. strikes

By Craig Whitlock
Monday, October 19, 2009

BERLIN -- Midway through a propaganda video released last month by a group calling itself the German Taliban, a surprise guest made an appearance: a cleanshaven, muscular gunman sporting the alias Abu Ibrahim the American.

The gunman did not speak but wore military fatigues and waved his rifle as subtitles identified him as an American. The video contained a stream of threats against Germany if it did not withdraw its troops from the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan. Although the American's part in the film lasted only a few seconds, it has alarmed German and U.S. intelligence officials, who are still puzzling over his background, his real identity and how he became involved with the terrorist group.

U.S. and European counterterrorism officials say a rising number of Western recruits -- including Americans -- are traveling to Afghanistan and Pakistan to attend paramilitary training camps. The flow of recruits has continued unabated, officials said, in spite of an intensified campaign over the past year by the CIA to eliminate al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in drone missile attacks.

Since January, at least 30 recruits from Germany have traveled to Pakistan for training, according to German security sources. About 10 people -- not necessarily the same individuals -- have returned to Germany this year, fueling concerns that fresh plots are in the works against European targets.

"We think this is sufficient to show how serious the threat is," said a senior German counterterrorism official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

German security services have been on high alert since last month, when groups affiliated with the Taliban and al-Qaeda issued several videos warning that an attack on German targets was imminent if the government did not bring home its forces from Afghanistan.

There are about 3,800 German troops in the country, the third-largest NATO contingent after those of the United States and Britain. German officials say Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders are trying to exploit domestic opposition in Germany to the war; surveys show that a majority of German voters favor a withdrawal of their soldiers.

The videos all featured German speakers who urged Muslims to travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan to join their cause.

"They're doing such good business that they are dropping a new video every week or so," said Ronald Sandee, a former Dutch military intelligence officer who serves as research director of the NEFA Foundation, a U.S. group that monitors terrorist networks. "If I were a young Muslim, I'd find them very convincing."

Last week, German officials disclosed that a 10-member cell from Hamburg had left for Pakistan earlier this year. The cell is allegedly led by a German of Syrian descent but also includes ethnic Turks, German converts to Islam and one member with Afghan roots.

Other European countries are also struggling to keep their citizens from going to Pakistan for paramilitary training.

In August, Pakistani officials arrested a group of 12 foreigners headed to North Waziristan, a tribal region near the Afghan border where many of the camps are located. Among those arrested were four Swedes, including Mehdi Ghezali, a former inmate of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Meanwhile, three Belgians and a French citizen are facing trial in their respective home countries after they were arrested upon their return from Pakistani camps last year. The suspects deny they were part of a terrorist conspiracy or plotting attacks in Europe. But one defendant has admitted to French investigators that the group received explosives training while in Waziristan. Three other Belgian and French members of the alleged cell are still believed to be at large in Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Recruiting networks

European security officials have warned for many years of the threat posed by homegrown radicals who have gone to Afghanistan and Pakistan to wage jihad. Officials in some countries, such as Britain, said they have successfully cracked down on the number of would-be fighters going to South Asia. But others, such as Germany, are seeing a significant increase and struggling to contain it.

In the past, such volunteers were largely self-motivated and had to find their own way to South Asia. Today, however, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have developed extensive recruiting networks with agents on the ground in Europe, counterterrorism officials said. The agents provide guidance, money, travel routes and even letters of recommendation so the recruits can join up more easily.

In a recent report, the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service said there were a "growing number of indications" that more Europeans were attending camps in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Obama administration has said that al-Qaeda's command structure and operations wing have become weaker in the past year because many of its leaders have been killed in drone missile attacks. But in its report, the Dutch intelligence agency offered a different assessment, saying that al-Qaeda's ability to carry out attacks has generally improved in recent years largely because it has successfully bolstered its alliances with other terrorist groups.

"With the jihadist agenda of those allies becoming more international, at least at the propaganda level, the threat to the West and its interests has intensified," the Dutch report found.

German officials said they have discovered multiple recruitment networks that work for al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other groups, such as the Islamic Jihad Union, which has been issuing many of the online threats against the German government. But they said the recruiting networks often operate independently, making it difficult for the security services to detect or disrupt them.

"In Germany, we don't have a uniform structure that recruits people," another senior German counterterrorism official said in an interview. "We have a wide variety of structures."

U.S. residents detained

Another sign of the internationalization of the recruitment networks is the small but growing participation of U.S. residents.

Abu Ibrahim the American, the gunman in last month's German Taliban video, is also being touted as a poster boy for jihadi recruitment on a Turkish-language Web site. The site, Sehadet Zamani, issues propaganda on behalf of the Islamic Jihad Union, an offshoot of an Uzbek terrorist group that now counts Turks, Germans, Arabs and Chechens among its members.

In July, U.S. officials announced that they had apprehended Bryant Neal Vinas, 25, a resident of Long Island, N.Y., who has confessed to traveling to al-Qaeda camps in Pakistan and firing rockets at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan.

Vinas, the son of immigrants from Peru and Argentina, is cooperating with U.S. and European authorities. He has testified about his interaction with the six-member cell of recruits from Belgium and France. Vinas has also told the FBI that he spent time in Pakistan with another New York resident, whose identity and whereabouts are unknown.

Last month, the FBI arrested yet another U.S. resident, Najibullah Zazi, and accused him of plotting a bombing in New York. Zazi, 24, an Afghan national who has lived in New York since he was a child, traveled to Pakistan last year.

U.S. intelligence officials have said that he made contact with a senior deputy to al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and learned how to make homemade bombs. Zazi said he went to Pakistan to visit his wife but has denied going to a training camp.

Terrorism analysts said the CIA campaign to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders had been generally effective, but warned that the strategy had its limitations and that missile attacks alone would not put an end to the training camps.

"The drone attacks seriously weaken these organizations, but you can't rely on that alone," said Guido Steinberg, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. "They obviously have no problem recruiting new members. In the long run, they won't have any problem replacing the leaders who have been killed."

On Saturday, the Pakistani military deployed 30,000 troops into South Waziristan as part of a broad offensive against the Taliban and other militant groups. U.S. and European officials have said they hope the mission will force many of the training camps to shut down.

But analysts said the camps, which offer basic lessons in homemade explosives and countersurveillance as well as weapons training, could easily relocate elsewhere in Pakistan or even back across the border in Afghanistan, where they operated before the U.S. invasion in 2001.

"We're talking about much smaller, much more mobile camps that don't train by the hundreds, but by the handful," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. "They can be repacked and set up again fairly easily and quickly."

Aug 15, 2009

In Dresden, Cultural Beauty Meets the Bigotry of Marwa al-Sherbini’s Murder

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

DRESDEN, Germany — In early July thousands of mourners took to the streets in Egypt, chanting “Down with Germany.” Thousands more Arabs and Muslims joined them in protests in Berlin. In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad added to the outcry by denouncing German “brutality.”

The provocation was the murder on July 1 of Marwa al-Sherbini, a pregnant Egyptian pharmacist here. She was stabbed 18 times in a Dresden courtroom, in front of her 3-year-old son, judges and other witnesses, reportedly by the man appealing a fine for having insulted Ms. Sherbini in a park. Identified by German authorities only as a 28-year-old Russian-born German named Alex W., he had called Ms. Sherbini an Islamist, a terrorist and a slut when she asked him to make room for her son on the playground swings. Ms. Sherbini wore a head scarf.

The killer also stabbed Elwi Okaz, Ms. Sherbini’s husband and a genetic research scientist, who was critically wounded as he tried to defend her. The police, arriving late on the scene, mistook him for the attacker and shot him in the leg.

More than a week passed before the German government, responding to rising anger across the Arab world, expressed words of sorrow while stressing that the attack did occur during the prosecution of a racist and that the accused man was originally from Russia.

Dresden is one of the great cultural capitals of Europe. It is also the capital of Saxony, a former part of East Germany that, along with having a reputation as Silicon Saxony, has made more than a few headlines in recent years for incidents of xenophobia and right-wing extremism. One wonders how to reconcile the heights of the city’s culture with the gutter of these events.

This year’s annual report of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, showed that far-right crime rose last year by 16 percent across the country. Most of these offenses were classified as propaganda crimes — painting swastikas on Jewish headstones or smashing the windows of restaurants run by immigrants — but politically motivated violent acts like murder, arson and assault accounted for 1,042 of the nearly 20,000 crimes recorded, a rise of 6.3 percent over 2007.

And these violent crimes turned out to be far more commonplace in parts of the former East Germany. Saxony, with roughly 5 percent of the country’s population, accounted for 12 percent of the violence classified as far right in nature, the report said.

These days Dresden’s center, once obliterated by Allied bombs, is a marvel of civility, a restored Baroque fairyland surrounded by Socialist-era and post-Socialist-era sprawl. The rebuilt Frauenkirche, the great Baroque cathedral where Bach played, again marks the skyline with its bell-shaped dome, as it did for centuries.

The ruin of the Frauenkirche became a gathering spot for protests against the East German regime during Communist times. In February, as usual on the anniversary of the Allied air raids, neo-Nazis marched through the streets. Some 7,500 of them carried banners condemning the “bombing holocaust.” They were outnumbered, Spiegel Online reported, by anti-Nazi demonstrators, but 7,500 was nonetheless twice as many neo-Nazis as showed up last year.

The other day only the benign clop-clop of horse-drawn carriages sounded across the cobblestone square outside the cathedral, the carriages bouncing camera-toting tourists past high-end jewelry shops and overpriced cafes. Nearby, the Zwinger palace, perhaps the most beautiful of all Baroque complexes, attracted the usual supplicants to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, which was paired in the Gemäldegalerie with an African sculpture.

Germany is now a bastion of democracy in the heart of Europe. But the far right is on the rise across the Continent, and xenophobia is gaining in this country, not least among youth and not least singling out Muslims. A recent two-year government survey of 20,000 German teenagers classified one in seven as “highly xenophobic” and another 26.2 percent as “fairly xenophobic.”

“It was known that the figures were high,” Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said. “But I’m appalled that they’re this high.”

The newspaper Tagesspiegel reported that Alex W. asked Ms. Sherbini in the courtroom, “Do you have a right to be in Germany at all?” before warning her that “when the N.D.P. comes to power, there’ll be an end to that.”

“I voted N.D.P..,” he added.

No surprise.

The far-right National Democratic Party, a marginal but noisy troublemaker on the German political scene with a tiny official membership (some 7,000), is as strong in Saxony as it is anywhere. Recent polls have routinely shown its support in the state as nearing 10 percent of the population; it claims 8 seats out of the 124 in the state parliament in Dresden. On Tuesday the party issued a statement calling for a black politician, Zeca Schall, working on regional elections in Thuringia for the ruling Christian Democratic Union, “to head home to Angola.” Thuringia should “remain German,” the statement said. Mr. Schall, Angolan-born, has lived in Thuringia, another region in the former East, since 1988.

High-tech industries and research institutes like the one where Ms. Sherbini’s husband works, which recruit foreign experts, have lifted Dresden economically above much of the rest of the former East, and last year nearly 10 million tourists fattened the city’s coffers. With half a million residents, some 20,000 of them foreigners, the capital looks prosperous and charming, like its old self.

All of which gets back to the problem of reconciliation: What are the humanizing effects of culture?

Evidently, there are none.

To walk through Dresden’s museums, and past the young buskers fiddling Mozart on street corners, is to wonder whether this age-old question may have things backward. It presumes that we’re passive receivers acted on by the arts, which vouchsafe our salvation, moral and otherwise, so long as we remain in their presence. Arts promoters nowadays like to trumpet how culture helps business and tourism; how teaching painting and music in schools boosts test scores. They try to assign practical ends, dollar values and other hard numbers, never mind how dubious, to quantify what’s ultimately unquantifiable.

The lesson of Dresden, which this great city unfortunately seems doomed to repeat, is that culture is, to the contrary, impractical and fragile, helpless even. Residents of Dresden who believed, when the war was all but over, that their home had somehow been spared annihilation by its beauty were all the more traumatized when, in a matter of hours, bombs killed tens of thousands and obliterated centuries of humane and glorious architecture.

The truth is, we can stare as long as we want at that Raphael Madonna; or at Antonello da Messina’s “St. Sebastian,” now beside a Congo fetish sculpture in another room in the Gemäldegalerie; or at the shiny coffee sets, clocks and cups made of coral and mother-of-pearl and coconuts and diamonds culled from the four corners of the earth in the city’s New Green Vault, which contains the spoils of the most cultivated Saxon kings. But it won’t make sense of a senseless murder or help change the mind of a violent bigot.

What we can also do, though, is accept that while the arts won’t save us, we should save them anyway. Because the enemies of civilized society are always just outside the door.