The death of 10 French soldiers in an ambush by insurgents in Afghanistan has stoked a cry at home for France to rethink its commitment to the seven-year mission led by the US.
Most French voters want out, and the opposition is ratcheting up the pressure on French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government — though analysts say France and other allies will dig in for the fight even as they insist upon a new look at NATO’s strategy against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
The word “quagmire” has popped up repeatedly when Afghanistan is discussed in Paris political circles — even in Sarkozy’s own party — since last Monday’s well-planned ambush of a French-led patrol in the Uzbin Valley east of Kabul. It was the deadliest attack on international troops in Afghanistan in more than three years, and the latest sign that the insurgency is growing stronger.
“The pressure is going to be: How do we get this war right?” said Francois Heisbourg, who heads the state-funded Foundation for Strategic Research think tank in Paris.
French Prime Minister Francois Fillon has ordered a parliamentary debate and vote on France’s role in Afghanistan, part of a new law requiring a lawmaker vote on foreign military missions lasting more than four months. They are expected to take place between Sept. 22 and Sept. 30.
Analysts say there is little chance that parliament — where Sarkozy’s conservatives have a large majority — will vote to end France’s participation in the Afghan mission.
But Afghanistan is likely to grow in the French public eye.
France has been at the side of the US in Afghanistan ever since the allied invasion in 2001 that toppled the Taliban’s regime. In April, Sarkozy agreed to raise the French commitment by 700 troops — to 3,300 in the Afghan theater.
The evolution of the war in Iraq — while in many ways very different from the one in Afghanistan — looms large in French minds when it comes to considering their country’s future role.
“In the case of Iraq, the Americans had a big strategic rethink about how they were handling it,” Heisbourg said. “That kind of rethink is what’s going to have to take place with Afghanistan.”
Sarkozy’s top adviser, Claude Gueant, said the French public has “poorly understood” the “faraway” war in Afghanistan. He said one of the troubles the allies now face in Afghanistan is the return of jihadi fighters from Iraq.
“Now that the situation is changing in Iraq, they are heading to a new front, which is the one in Afghanistan,” Gueant told Le Parisien newspaper in an interview that was set for publication yesterday.
Analysts say the risk for Sarkozy remains that the mission in Afghanistan could erode his popularity over time — much like former British Prime Minister Tony Blair faced political damage over his commitment to the Iraq War.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might