French President Francois Hollande visited Afghanistan yesterday to defend France’s imminent departure from the war, telling troops that it would be coordinated closely with Afghan and NATO allies.
Hollande met French soldiers deployed in the volatile province of Kapisa and held talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai on his first visit to the country where French troops have been fighting the Taliban since the 2001 US-led invasion.
He was accompanied by French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius and Army Chief of Staff Admiral Edouard Guillaud.
He explained his decision to recall French combat troops by the end of this year, a year earlier than Paris initially planned, and two years before NATO allies.
“It’s a sovereign decision. Only France can decide what France does,” he told soldiers at Nijrab Base in Kapisa, where most of France’s 3,550 troops in the country are based.
“It will be conducted in good understanding with our allies, especially US President [Barack] Obama, who understands the reasons, and in close consultation with Afghan authorities,” Hollande said.
Kapisa, which commands part of the access to Kabul from Taliban flashpoints on the Pakistani border, has proved a tough fight for the French, troubled by turf wars between the Islamist insurgents and drug dealers.
Hollande conceded the threat posed by terrorists in Afghanistan had been not been eradicated since the 2001 invasion toppled the Taliban regime for sheltering Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the US.
“Without having totally disappeared, the terrorist threat from Afghanistan to our and our allies’ territory has been partially curbed,” he said.
Hollande said 2,000 French soldiers would leave by the end of the year, but added that France would continue development projects. He has also indicated that French troops will continue to train Afghan police and soldiers.
However, the time had come, he said, for Afghans to “take the path they choose freely” in deciding the future of their country.
Hollande told Obama in Camp David and the NATO summit in Chicago that he would not renege on a campaign pledge to repatriate French combat troops by the end of the year.
France has lost 83 soldiers in Afghanistan.
It provides the fifth-largest contingent to NATO’s 130,000-strong US-led force, but allies have downplayed the effect of their early departure, saying Afghan troops are ready to take over.
Paris has reserved judgment on contributing to the cost of the Afghan security budget, estimated at US$4.1 billion a year from 2015.
The relatively quiet Kabul district of Surobi, where French troops are also based, was handed over to local control last month.
Kapisa has been included in the third of a five-phase transfer, which Afghan officials say could take as little as six months, but which NATO’s International Security Assistance Force has timetabled at 12 to 18 months.
However, analysts have expressed concern about NATO’s withdrawal, pointing out that Afghan forces have a mixed record at best and questioning whether a security vacuum will only heighten violence if not hasten a return to civil war.
“Clearly there is a rush for the exits by Western leaders, but there is no Plan B to address worsening battlefield conditions and political crises if they occur,” veteran Afghan watcher Ahmed Rashid wrote in The New York Review of Books.
More Afghan civilians died last year than the total number of NATO troops, 3,009, killed since 2001. In addition, last year’s 3,021 civilian deaths marked the fifth consecutive year that the toll has risen, according to UN figures.
The number of internal refugees last year hit nearly half a million, the highest for about a decade, part of what Amnesty International has called “a largely hidden, but horrific humanitarian and human rights crisis.”
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to