Sarkozy determined, tough on Afghan war

WASHINGTON, Aug. 20 (UPI) -- French President Nicholas Sarkozy took a leaf out of Margaret Thatcher's guidelines on leadership Wednesday with his surprise visit to Afghanistan following the deaths of 10 French troops in a mountain battle east of Kabul.

It was the largest loss of life for the French armed forces from hostile action in a quarter-century since the dark day when 58 French paratroopers were killed in their sleep in a terrorist attack outside Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983, on the same night that a parallel attack killed 241 U.S. Marines sleeping in their barracks.

Sarkozy's response echoed that of British Prime Minister Thatcher after 18 British soldiers were killed by an Irish Republican Army bomb booby-trap at Warrenpoint, County Down, in Northern Ireland in 1979. Thatcher flew at once to the devastated units to show her personal identification with them.

The attack on the French troops was by far the worst -- and as far as the Taliban and al-Qaida guerrillas were concerned, by far the most successful -- against NATO forces in the Afghan war so far. And it also serves notice how seriously the conflict there is escalating.

There are already 36,000 U.S. forces alone operating in Afghanistan, not counting those from France, Germany and other NATO allies. U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois has pledged to send at least 10,000 more U.S. troops to the troubled Central Asian nation if he is elected. But that may prove a drop in a bucket.

The resurgent Islamist Taliban, who sheltered al-Qaida until they were toppled by U.S.-led forces in late 2001, now control most of the southern half of the country, and U.S.-supported President Hamid Karzai can only control the capital Kabul and as much of the country the U.S. and NATO troops can hold down for him.

On the other hand, the populous Pashtun tribes of southern and southeastern Afghanistan can count on strong support from neighboring Pakistan, where they or their allies effectively now control all of the vast North-West Frontier province, which covers around a quarter of Pakistan. The Pakistani army has lost up to 2,000 casualties at the hands of Taliban forces and has no stomach to tackle them head-on, as the United States has insisted.

However, Sarkozy's bold visit serves notice that he is determined to maintain and even boost France's presence in Afghanistan.

Sarkozy is both pro-American and a strong supporter of the NATO alliance. Overriding fierce domestic opposition from right and left, he is pushing ahead to reintegrate his country into NATO's unified military command structure. President Charles de Gaulle, revered creator of France's current Fifth Republic, removed his country from the unified command structure more than four decades ago.

Sarkozy appears to have the ambition of supplanting Britain as the United States' main and best trans-Atlantic partner in Europe. Given the unpopularity of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the popular reaction in Britain against former Prime Minster Tony Blair's decision to send significant British troops to operate in southern Iraq in the years following the 2003 Iraq war, the window of opportunity to achieve this ambition is certainly there.

Only a few weeks ago, Sarkozy unveiled an ambitious Defense White Paper that announced highly ambitious goals to restructure the French armed forces along "leaner, meaner" and high-tech lines. One of the main goals of this policy was to give France a powerful rapid military deployment capability around the world, which it has long lacked.

Sarkozy's visit to France sends the message that his radically innovative foreign policy is aligned with the United States broadly but not simply following along behind. Sarkozy is also showing he will not hesitate to take the initiative and act boldly.