Germany’s resettlement effort for Afghans is in a phase of uneasy improvisation. Hundreds of Afghans remain in Pakistan awaiting placement under various admission programs, while Pakistan deported more than 200 from a special intake for particularly vulnerable individuals. A number were released from deportation camps after bilateral contacts, and Germany has arranged accommodation in Afghanistan for those deported, while pressing Islamabad to allow the return of the 211 in order to continue their case processing. Overall, thousands of Afghans with offers remain waiting in Pakistan, because the German embassy in Kabul has been closed since 2021 and screening now occurs there. On an about-face in mid-August 2025, the government signaled it would not oppose entry visas for Afghan families, subject to an individual assessment, a legally binding commitment to admission, and security checks conducted by German authorities in Pakistan. By mid-June 2025, roughly 2,400 people with admission offers were still waiting, and criticism has grown that processing times are too long. The issue has fed political contention since the new government took office, including a pact between the Union and SPD to wind down voluntary admission programs “as far as possible.”

What a case this is for the enduring drama of freedom under the rule of law. It lays bare the central contradiction at the heart of modern statecraft: a humane impulse to help strangers, yoked to the compulsions of bureaucratic management. The knowledge necessary to decide rightly who is vulnerable, who can be trusted, where integration will succeed, does not reside in Berlin or Islamabad’s ministries; it is dispersed among families, employers, local communities, and private charities across continents. Yet the machinery of the state seeks to collar that dispersed knowledge, to translate it into rules, quotas, and checks. The attempt to orchestrate asylum through formal commitments, security screens, and politically negotiated pacts reveals an instinct to manage human lives as if they were case files on a grand ledger. In the long run, such plans are undone by their own complexity: retrasos, reversals, and opaque criteria erode trust and widen the gulf between intention and outcome.

There is virtue in outsourcing aspects of humanitarian care to private providers and to civil society—their knowledge of local conditions, their flexibility, their capacity for humane adaptation—so long as the state does not surrender its essential duty to uphold a stable, predictable framework of rights and procedures. The insistence on “legally binding commitments” and security reviews should be grounded in a transparent rule of law, not in political whim or makeshift arrangements born of crisis. The insistence that screening occur where the state can guarantee the integrity of the process is proper, but the accompanying delays betray a deeper lesson: central planning, when wielded over the movement of people, tends to distort the very purposes it pretends to advance. If there is a guiding principle to carry forward, let it be this: mercy must be organized within lawful, stable institutions that respect individual liberty and the dispersed knowledge of society. Let the admission of those in need be guided by the long arc of voluntary cooperation, not by the expediencies of political bargaining.