For the Afghans waiting in limbo or the families mourning airstrike victims, words like “humanitarian protection” and “precision” must sound bitterly ironic. Western governments present themselves as careful guardians of safety and rights, but the readings show how fragile those claims become once tested by political shifts or flawed intelligence. What remains is a collapse of trust in the very institutions that claimed to offer protection in the first place.
In the German case, the breakdown of trust is immediate and personal. Reuters shows how Afghans like Kimia, who risked their lives as women’s rights activists, entered a program that promised resettlement, only to be abandoned when the new government suspended it. Politico notes that women, LGBTQ+ people, and educators deemed “particularly vulnerable” were stranded after Merz’s government froze flights. Euronews emphasises the punitive framing of deportations (all 81 deportees had criminal records) but that framing blurs into a wider deterrent logic. Trust is eroded at two levels: Afghans who believed German commitments discovered those promises were politically reversible, and German society is told that humanitarian admissions are incompatible with “integration capacity.” What began as a moral obligation is reframed as a discretionary favor, withdrawn when electorally inconvenient.
The American case similarly exposes how the military’s narrative of precision collapses under scrutiny. The Pentagon records analysed by the New York Times document case after case where flawed intelligence produced lethal civilian casualties. “Men on motorcycles” mistaken for fighters, a “heavy object” actually being a child. The Mosul strike that killed the Zeidan family shows how assessments of “no civilian presence” were treated as fact despite contradictory evidence. Here too, trust was central: U.S. leaders sold drone warfare as “the most precise air campaign in history.” But the investigation shows that precision rhetoric masked systemic failures and allowed officials to sidestep accountability. The very technology that was supposed to guarantee moral warfare became a tool for sustaining illusions.
The broader question that kept coming up during these readings is: what happens when states systematically break the trust of those who depended on them most? The Afghans waiting in Islamabad, the families killed in Mosul. Both are emblematic examples that represent people who had no power over the policies that determined their fate. Their safety depended on the reliability of German promises and American intelligence. Instead, they became expendable to political calculus or military convenience.
This erosion of trust has long-term consequences that are not widely understood, yet. It undermines the credibility of Western claims to moral leadership. When Germany tells activists to “just wait” while shutting the program down, or when the U.S. dismisses civilian deaths as inevitable mistakes, both are implicitly saying that Afghan lives are conditional, valued only when politically or strategically advantageous. The deeper question raised by these readings, then, is whether humanitarian and military commitments are ever more than provisional tools of statecraft. If protection can be suspended at will, and accountability indefinitely deferred, is trust in such commitments anything more than a fiction?
