Mission Goes Ahead

The country's highest court on Monday dismissed the urgent application by Willy Wimmer from Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union and Peter Gauweiler from its sister party, the Christian Social Union, on technical grounds, clearing the last possible hurdle to the Afghan mission.

Wimmer and Gauweiler said they wanted to prevent Germany from "becoming entangled in US military operations that contravene international law" after the Bundestag approved the mission on Friday.

The mission has proved highly controversial in a country that is wary of sending troops into combat because of its World War II past.

Reconnaissance missions could begin next month

Defense Minister Franz Josef Jung has said the Tornados will be used to supply aerial images of Taliban positions and could be deployed in Afghanistan by mid-April.

Jung said the jets will not be sent into combat, but critics argued that the mission amounts to a combat intervention as the information gathered by the planes will be used to plan NATO attacks.

Members of Germany's lower house of parliament approved the Tornado deployment by 405 to 157 votes -- the most divided result in a vote on a German military operation abroad in recent history.

Germany has nearly 3,000 troops in the relatively peaceful northern Afghanistan where they hold the command of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

Afghan mission will continue

Their presence came under the spotlight at the weekend when Islamist groups threatened to target Germany and to kill two German hostages in Iraq unless the country withdrew its soldiers from Afghanistan.

The government said it would not give in to their demands and Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said Monday that Germany "won't be blackmailed."

Wolfgang Bosbach, the interior expert for the conservative CDU/CSU group in the Bundestag and a party colleague of Chancellor Angela Merkel, said German troops' mission in the north of Afghanistan and the deployment of German Tornado reconnaissance jets in the south would continue despite the threats.

"It would be a major mistake if we were to stay out of the fight against international terror," he said in an interview with the Rheinische Post newspaper. "Therefore, the security position will not change and neither will the decision on the Tornado deployment in Afghanistan."