The country of Afghanistan is currently divided into two parts: the south and east, which have seen a resurgent Taliban and thus are quite dangerous, and the north and west, which are much quieter.

The dangerous part of Afghanistan is occupied by troops from the US, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands. Principally centered in Helmand province, there is a daily grind of patrol, ambush by IED, rifle and RPG. There are constant casualties, although not on the level of Iraq.

In the north and western parts of Afghanistan, occupied by NATO forces of Germany, Spain and Italy, it’s rather calm, and the daily patrolling is not resisted as fiercely. Reconstruction and improvement efforts continue apace, and there seem to be real signs of progress.

Man, those Germans sure have it easy. Remember when they used to be the most frightening army in the world? Why aren’t they out in the south and east, kicking ass?

Thus whines Roger Cohen in an Op-Ed in today’s NY Times.

Remember the Wehrmacht? It was a formidable fighting force. The modern German army, the Bundeswehr, is also very effective. Thing is, it is reluctant to fight or even place itself in danger.

Given history, that may seem just fine. The United States helped frame the institutions of today’s Germany precisely to guarantee peace over war. But in Afghanistan, where 3,200 Germans serve in a hard-pressed NATO force, a touch of “Bundesmacht” would be welcome.

Yes, incredibly enough, Mr Cohen yearns for the days of blitzkrieg and Panzer Vorwärts!, armored monsters crashing through village walls, machine gunning any human being standing up, and all to the stirring strains of “Ich hatt’ einen Kamerad” or perhaps the “Panzerlied.”

Mr Cohen describes the divided areas of tactical responsibility as:

“The split gives a rough guide to parts of the world that still see military force as inextricable from international security and others that are now functionally pacifist.”

I spent a little bit of time rubbing shoulders with the Bundesheer, and they seemed quite prepared to kick the Scheisse out of the Red Army juggernaut if it ever crossed the Inter German Border. There was no lack of patriotic motivation for that fight. That was more than 30 years ago, and perhaps a new generation doesn’t feel as martial as Mr Cohen requires them to be.

“In Afghanistan, NATO solidarity collapses at the point of danger,” said Julian Lindley-French, a military expert at the Netherlands Defense Academy. “There’s no point planning robust operations worldwide if the burden is not shared. A lot of the German troops are little more than heavily armed traffic cops.”

I can almost hear Mr Lindley-French sniffing in disdain. Those heavily-armed traffic cops were assigned to the north by the ground commander at the time, who was an American.

I suppose it would be useless to point out that NATO became involved in Afghanistan on behalf of the UN Security Council after Mr Bu$h decided “What the hell. I’ve got the troops over here, thanks to 9/11. Now I might just as well knock off Iraq, as my buddies at PNAC and Big Oil want me to”? It would probably not matter to Mr Cohen that NATO was convinced, inveigled and bribed to pick up the slack in Afghanistan when the bulk of the US Army was busy conquering Iraq’s oil deposits.

Mr Cohen might be surprised, if he had taken the time to more thoroughly research his opinion, to learn that NATO got involved in the south in the place of a US-led mission that had seen quite a bit of fighting:

On July 31 NATO will take control of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan's volatile south, where six British soldiers were killed in the last month. This will be the most demanding operation ever undertaken by the alliance in in [sic] its 58-year-old history, and an important test for its relevance in a post cold-war world. The NATO commander, British Lieut. General David Richards, sat down with TIME's Aryn Baker in the garden at his headquarters in Kabul for a conversation about his new responsibilities.

Prior to this point, NATO had operated as the ISAF and its contribution in Afghanistan had mainly been in the area surrounding the capital Kabul. An October 2003 resolution (requested by the US) extended ISAF responsibility throughout Afghanistan.

So, NATO apparently took over a bad area which had seen combat, and US and British deaths, and now it’s calm. (Well, if you had “heavily armed traffic cops” in your town wouldn’t you behave?) And so Mr Cohen wants Germany to take over the south and east which is heavily contested by the Taliban, who had a good long rest in Pakistan’s Waziristan, thanks to US refusal to close the gap at Tora Bora in 2001. It seems to me that Mr Cohen is resorting to name calling and taunts to persuade the Germans to finish the job the “A” team blew six years ago.

[W]ith the Taliban regrouping, and support for it still arriving from Pakistani border areas, security has become inseparable from eliminating insurgents. Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the American commander of the NATO force, said “thousands” of Taliban had been killed this year; other officers put the figure around 5,000.

Wow – I wish we could kill 5,000 al Qaeda in Iraq. I’m having a problem imagining the Taliban fielding what is effectively the better part of a division of fighters. A cautious observer might well wonder about whether we’re using Viet Nam rules in Afghanistan, too.

Some of this counterinsurgency toll is the work of U.S. and other special forces in the separate American-run Operation Enduring Freedom — the more secret of the Afghan campaigns. Still, NATO is at war here.

That, however, is a fact Europeans are reluctant to accept, just as the link between slaughter in Madrid, London or Amsterdam and the Afghan-Pakistani terror nexus seems unconvincing to many Europeans floating on an Iraq-comforted wave of moral smugness.

I’d recommend Mr Cohen talk with some Europeans. That “smugness” is more likely an unwillingness to walk where Americans have been because there’s doo-doo all over the ground.