Cannon fodder
At last he is acting like a president of the French Fifth Republic – taking major decisions about foreign policy and France’s place in the world, leaving the merely domestic stuff to his government. Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to send troops into Afghanistan may turn out to be the single most important act of his five-year presidency, how ironic, then, that he has handled it so badly. A year ago we were all saying that Nicolas Sarkozy’s greatest strength was his consummate skill at communication. This latest business over sending troops to Afghanistan calls all that into question.
First of all he made the announcement in possibly the most inappropriate place – the Royal Gallery of the British House of Lords: Royal, British and, as far as many French people are concerned, full of irrelevant aristocrats (the Commons did not suspend their business to listen to the French President). Hemmed in and dwarfed by two huge murals, Nelson at Trafalgar towering above him on his left, Wellington at Waterloo dominating his right, the somewhat undersized Sarkozy chose to announce a U-turn in French foreign policy to the traditional enemy. Worse, he made his announcement in the heart of the very institution which, in French eyes, failed democracy by meekly allowing Tony Blair to send British troops into Iraq.
French parliamentarians were mortified and deeply shocked. They complained to their Prime Minister, who mollified them by saying of course you can debate it – but then adding there will be no vote. An emasculated exercise in shop-window democracy. The Assemblée Nationale is now in no doubt as to its continuing lack of relevance within Nicolas Sarkozy’s Fifth Republic. The institutional reforms suggested by Edouard Balladur making it compulsory to consult Parliament before any troops are sent abroad for more than 6 months look less than convincing. But we did consult you, Nicolas Sarkozy might say: the reforms don’t say anything about voting. Anyway, there are 1,600 French troops there already (2,200 in the Stans region as a whole).
If he had set out to anger his compatriots deliberately he could not have done better. During his election campaign a year ago, Sarkozy promised to bring home the French troops already in Afghanistan (“What I promise I will do”), and even last summer the Minister of Defence said: “The President of the Republic has clearly established that the troops have no reason for remaining durablement in Afghanistan”. In a recent poll nearly two thirds said they were against sending more troops to Afghanistan. For many French people the Taliban have ceased to have any importance (part of this may be political correctness, not to be heard bashing Muslims, however extreme and unrepresentative they may be, to avoid angering the Muslims in France) and the information they receive is often contradictory – one report yesterday said the main area of violence was the east “where the Talibans and Al Quaida operate”, another said the south is where the action is, where “the Taliban have re-taken control”. Who cares? At best the war is seen as a lost cause, supported by the intolerable George Doubleyou, himself a lost cause, but for many the war anyway has been lost – on last night’s radio there were those saying France should negotiate with the Taliban and be done with it. In other words just as in 2003 they seemed willing to leave Saddam to continue his butchery, they have either forgotten quite who the Taliban are and what they represent or, like many in Britain, they believe the Taliban have changed their spots. French anger is less about Sarkozy sending French soldiers to a battle zone than his undoing 50 years of French independence, undoing De Gaulle’s great work: he is joining the abomination, the Anglo-Saxon alliance. Atlantism is still a dirty word in some quarters. But if Sarkozy’s wider ambition is nothing to do with Afghanistan, rather increased French power in the Mediterranean, how else can he achieve that than by giving a sop to the Americans? And what better sop than to send a few more troops (the original 1,000 has this morning been reduced to 800) to help out in a forgotten war?
April 3rd, 2008 at 7:44 am
I think it’s pushing it to suggest that Sarkozy’s on-the-fly decision to send troops is a cunning, thought-out ploy to fend off America. Far more likely that it’s yet again his deep-seated psychological flaws coming to the surface with alarming results. His strutting, show-off persona isn’t about confidence, it’s all about over-compensating for insecurity; the flipside of that is a desperate need to please, to seek approval - it doesn’t matter from whom, and it doesn’t matter if it upsets the people you really ought to be thinking about. I think Sarko’s inner child was unable to overcome the temptation to make a grand gesture intended to get the approval of his British hosts (and the attentive UK press). It’s all about instant gratification of his own insatiable need for reassurance. That’s what all the bling nonsense is about, that’s why the trophy woman on his arm, that’s why the cockiness - all of which is pretty harmless. But when he’s gratifying his own psychological needs by putting lives on the line and getting further entangled in a complicated and probably unwinnable war, things have got very serious indeed. This might just be the beginning of the end for him.
April 3rd, 2008 at 8:35 am
Isnt Afghanistans still the World’s Largest Opium Producer?
well it still seems like it
http://coirault-neuburger.blog.lemonde.fr/2007/09/23/paradis-artificiels-quen-est-il-de-lafghanistan/
i quote
Un trafic de plusieurs milliards de dollars Selon l’ONU, l’Afghanistan fournit en 2006 environ 92 pour cent de l’offre mondiale d’opium, qui est employé pour préparer l’Héroïne.L’ONU estime qu’en 2006, la contribution du trafic de drogue à l’économie afghane est de l’ordre de 2.7 milliards de dollars. “
couldnt we justify the war on terror, why could we not justify it on war on drugs…
being french i couldnt be against that!
i dont know how you feel about that
but i still think
that drugs needs to be stopped at least needs to be fighted against?
Troups against the talibans No ..
but maybe against the mafia that makes millions out of it?
April 3rd, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I agree with you, Blue, about the man’s character and perhaps I am merely trying to find some small grain of presidential thought behind all the sickening razzamatazz. After all, we have to assume that while his style is perhaps of his own making, matters such as foreign policy must be worked out by others - and his people are not all as approval-seeking as he is (though I am willing to be proved wrong on that). No, what I find interesting is quite what Afghanistan means to him. It’s a low-priority war, there was no reason for him to get involved. His big obsession is the Mediterranean. I am willing to believe that he genuinely sees the Med. as a place to found a Sarko empire. He knows he can’t do that any more in Europe, but he may well see France as the pivotal country which politically as well as geographically can bestride both. But the Americans are already in the Mediterranean. I don’t think he wants to “fend them off”, on the contrary I think he wants to work with them, believing, as Tony Blair did, that he can get concessions out of them for good behaviour. In return for 800 troops in Afghanistan he hopes to get some freedom in the Mediterranean. I also agree with you that this might just be the beginning of the end for him (which is what I meant when I wrote that sending the troops might be the single most important act in his presidency, as similar decisions were for Bush and Blair).
I also think, Pierre, that you’re right about the opium producers. My knowledge is not great on this, but I’ve accepted the reports which say the Taliban are responsible for the return to high levels of opium production. If that is true that I can’t believe people can say we should sit down round a table and negotiate with them. The cost in human suffering due to opium and its main derivatives, including of course AIDS, is phenomenal. Again the question about Sarkozy’s action as I wrote in the blog is why did he not communicate this better? Going for the drugs angle actually would work better than trying to raise the spectre of Al Quaida which no longer seems to cut ice in Europe (maybe still in the US).
STOP PRESS: It seems George Doubleyou this afternoon (Thursday) told NATO leaders that Sarkozy “is the latest incarnation of Elvis”.
April 4th, 2008 at 8:29 am
Agree on the drug angle Tim and Pierre - but I don’t think going to war is necessarily the answer here. In fact the hugely expensive US-funded and US ‘adviser’ led wars against drug cartels in S America don’t seem to have achieved anything, other than making Europe awash with cocaine. We have to accept that Afghanis have always grown opium (and hashish too) and that they’re rather good at it, conditions are ideal etc. The problem is that the wrong guys have got control of it at the moment, are deliberately pumping heroin into the West to destabilise society and are using the profits for their war chest. Instead of ripping up poppy fields and trying to persuade farmers to grow beans or whatever - thus slashing their income - shouldn’t we use the money currently being spent on an unwinnable war to instead buy up the entire opium crop every year to turn it into medical morphine? This would put income where it’s needed in Afghanistan - at the bottom. It would remove the financial clout of the Taliban and take away their raison d’etre as defenders of the homeland, whilst providing sufficient decentralised wealth for the country to return to equilibrium. The problem I guess is that this would require the US to back down and admit that like other imperial invaders before them, they have been unable to defeat the Afghani tribes.