For years, Germans were just fine thinking of Afghanistan as merely a reconstruction effort - and their political leaders were happy to keep that misconception alive. But since the bombing in Kunduz that killed several civilians, all of that has changed. Now the country is being forced to admit to itself that it's at war.

It is rare that one can pinpoint the exact moment when a country's geo-political identity, built up over years of tentative forays onto the global stage, comes unraveled.

But for Germany, that moment is easily identifiable. At precisely 1:50 a.m. local time on Sept. 4, 2009, two 500 pound bombs, dropped seconds earlier from a pair of NATO F-15 fighter jets, came crashing down on a low sandbank in the middle of the Kunduz River in Afghanistan.

Ordered by a German commander on the ground, the bombs slammed into a large crowd of locals, many of them there to collect gasoline from two tanker trucks which had become stuck in the soft sand after having been hijacked by Taliban insurgents just hours before. Up to 142 people were killed and several of them, perhaps dozens, were civilians.

Germans, of course, have slowly become aware that their soldiers - after eight years of participation in NATO's Afghanistan mission - are exposed to the kind of danger they haven't experienced since World War II. Nevertheless, the country has steadfastly refused to address the true, violent nature of the deployment - and politicians in Berlin have preferred to downplay the mission. The country, in short, has never acknowledged that it is at war.