WorldView:Germany's august Frankfurter Allgemeinenewspaper ran a front page editorial on Thursday headlined: "Ein bisschen schwanger" - a little bit pregnant, writes Derek Scally
The headline and editorial mocked Berlin's attempts to deny the obvious: that this week's cabinet decision to deploy six Tornado fighter aircraft in southern Afghanistan cranks up Germany's involvement in the battle against the Taliban.
Defence minister Franz Josef Jung is at pains to describe the mission of the Tornado aircraft not as combat but reconnaissance: to photograph Taliban strongholds in flyovers and not get involved in combat.
His reconnaissance refrain is of political necessity because Bundestag backing is necessary if the aircraft are to begin their work in April, and no German MP wants to think he or she is voting to send soldiers to active combat.
"Behind all the attempts to . . . not let it appear like a war deployment lies the hope of being able to be just little bit pregnant in international affairs," wrote the Frankfurter Allgemeine. It said Berlin wanted to participate in the war against international terrorism "without having to get its own hands too dirty - or even burned".
The question is whether a Taliban fighter with an anti-aircraft missile aimed at a German reconnaissance aircraft is likely to wait and see if the aircraft drops, bombs or takes snaps.
The government's softly, softly approach shows how difficult it is for Germany to accept that, because of its Nato commitments, it is for all intents and purposes, a country at war.
Yet this latest decision is a sign that Berlin feels the time has come for it to make a greater contribution in Afghanistan, where Nato's reputation is on the line.
Indeed, some in Germany are disappointed that Nato has asked for only six aircraft because it would be impossible to describe a larger deployment as anything other than combat, thus ending the moral hair-splitting on what constitutes involvement in a war.
Either way, the upcoming Bundestag debate on the deployment will provide a chance to gauge German attitudes to military missions abroad.
It's 13 years since the constitutional court ruled that foreign missions were possible for the Bundeswehr where there was a risk to the security of Germany or its Nato allies.
Today over 9,000 German troops are stationed around the world, from the Balkans and Afghanistan right up to the recent deployments during elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo and to patrol the Lebanese coast.
Since the heated Bundestag debate in 1999 on German deployment in Kosovo, the first foreign deployment of German troops since the second World War, subsequent deployments of Bundeswehr soldiers have met with ever-decreasing parliamentary opposition.
When the former chancellor Gerhard Schröder made the promise during a 2002 election rally of no German "military misadventures" in Iraq, he made clear he wasn't principally opposed to wars.
He even got a cheer from the crowd when he said that Germany's days of "cheque-book diplomacy" were over, referring to the financial rather than military support the Kohl administration gave the US.
Last October, a new security policy document formalised the transition of the Bundeswehr, in Jung's words, "from a defence army . . . to an army in action".
Despite the transformation, however, German military spending as a percentage of the entire budget has shrunk by a third since the 1990s.
In three weeks, before the Bundestag agrees to the €35 million deployment in southern Afghanistan, it is likely to attach a precondition: that Germany use its greater involvement to assume greater responsibility for Nato's strategic decisions in Afghanistan.
That will be a hot topic among world leaders and military experts gathered in Munich this weekend for the annual security conference.
Attendees will be listening particularly closely to US defence secretary Robert Gates' speech tomorrow for clues to US future policy in Afghanistan beyond countering the Taliban's expected "spring offensive".
Gates got a lukewarm response in Seville on Thursday to his request for Nato allies to send more troops to Afghanistan, in particular from Germany.
"The Russians had 100,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and they didn't win," pointed out Jung. He told Gates that, aside from a one-off deployment of 500 soldiers, Berlin has no other plans to significantly increase its 3,000 troops stationed in the north of the country.
In Munich, German officials will press their view that further troop build-up is a one-way street to greater military conflict, and that the Afghanistan conflict cannot be solved militarily alone, but through rebuilding the country too.
In Berlin, the debate over Germany's future military role looms large over a discussion to create a memorial for the 2,600 soldiers killed on duty since the foundation of the Bundeswehr in 1956.
Relatives have called for a public memorial in front of the Reichstag building, where MPs have the last word on all military missions.
But Jung has spoken out in favour of a site inside the high-security defence ministry complex, scene of the execution of Count von Stauffenberg and others involved in the failed 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler.
The defence ministry wants the memorial to be a general one with no names of dead soldiers, a plan that has annoyed families and many politicians.
But regardless of its final form, the memorial is a tacit acceptance by Berlin that a greater military role lies ahead for Germany, and with it the high price of soldiers arriving home in coffins.