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PARIS - President Nicolas Sarkozy is battling widening public reluctance and significant political doubts over France's involvement in the war in Afghanistan.
Yesterday, the Government announced it would beef up its force in Afghanistan and MPs agreed to extend the nearly seven-year-old French deployment there.
But the debate exposed nervousness within Sarkozy's Government, sparked by the loss of 10 troops in an ambush last month, mounting civilian deaths from United States air strikes and fears that the US is blundering into a war in neighbouring Pakistan.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon called for legislators to display "national consensus" and honour the undertaking made in 2001 by the then President Jacques Chirac, like Sarkozy a conservative, and by the Premier at the time, Lionel Jospin, a Socialist. Defence Minister Herve Morin warned a French pullout would be a "dramatic sign" that international resolve to fight terrorism was on the wane. "We must not abandon our Afghan friends," urged Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.
But the Socialists, the main opposition party after last year's elections, dealt the Government a hammer blow. Along with the Communists and Greens, it voted against keeping the troops in Afghanistan, yielding a 343-210 outcome in the National Assembly.
Some members of Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Majority (UMP) also voted against or abstained. They said France was perilously following a US line in which accidental casualties from air strikes and forays into Pakistan were alienating local people.
France has 3000 troops among the 70,000 multinational force that was deployed to Afghanistan after the Taleban were ousted from power.
In July, Parliament overhauled the Constitution, weakening the President's far-reaching powers. Under the revision, any foreign military operation decided by the head of state has to be approved by Parliament in order to gain extension beyond four months.
But yesterday's debate could hardly have been worse-timed for Sarkozy. Ten paratroopers were killed in an ambush in eastern Afghanistan's Uzbin Valley on August 18.
Until then, the French public could fairly be described as considering the conflict obscure and Afghanistan remote.
But this mood shifted swiftly to horror as TV showed lines of coffins draped with the tricolore and Paris-Match magazine ran photos of the Taleban showing off weapons and military clothing allegedly stripped from the corpses.
According to a poll published last Tuesday for the news weekly l'Express, 62 per cent of voters want the troops withdrawn. Only 34 per cent want them to stay.
Fillon bitterly attacked as "lies and disinformation" a report in the Globe and Mail daily in Toronto, Canada, that the paras had run out of ammunition after only 90 minutes and had only one radio that was quickly knocked out, leaving them powerless to call down air support.
Patrice Franceschi, a writer with years of experience on the ground in Afghanistan, said equipment and air support were only one aspect of a complex problem.
The biggest challenges, he said, were to hand over security duties to Afghan forces and stop US air strikes that were inflicting a bloody toll on civilians. According to United Nations figures, 1445 civilians were killed from January to August this year, an increase of 39 per cent over the same period last year.
"If President Sarkozy has sufficient clout, he should tell the Americans to stop the bombing," he said. "Every air raid which causes civilian casualties prompts a thousand more Afghans to line up with the insurgents."
