Germans Replacing Canadians in RC-South?

Following a Twitter tip, I managed to track down this article (PDF in German, and Google English translation) from Germany’s Deutscher Depeschen Dienst news agency:

…. The (German) federal government expects that the U.S. expected the deployment of another 2,500 German troops under the general increase in troops for Afghanistan. It will only after the Berlin Conference on Afghanistan on 28 January in London to decide. NATO officer in Brussels pointed out that it would thought that the German soldiers, the Canadians in the southern province of Helmand to replace ….

While Canadian troops have fought in Helmand, those who read German better than I do indicate this means that Germans could replace Canadians in the south – happy to hear from anyone who reads German if that isn’t the case.

Given how Germany’s political masters control how the troops get to do their job in Afghanistan – this, from a recent U.S. Congressional Research Service report (PDF via Federation of American Scientists):

Senior U.S. military officials point with concern, for example, to constraints on German forces in Afghanistan, which are imposed by Germany’s parliament the Bundestag. These include restrictions on German training and advisory teams that do not allow them to conduct combined offensive operations with their Afghan counterparts, and on capable German Special Operations Forces (SOF) that are “FOB-locked,” that is, effectively confined to their Forward Operating Base.

– one wonders how willing German politicians will be to change the rules to make them closer to those engaged in the fight in Afghanistan’s south.

(Crossposted to The Torch)

Update (1): There’s rumours of more German troops headed to Afghanistan (but still some political conflict over whether they should head south).