Watching French President Nicolas Sarkozy today at Les Invalides, France's monumental military museum and mausoleum for Napoleon, I could not help but thinking that President George W. Bush missed more than 4,000 opportunities to show similar public respect for the fallen American soldiers from the Iraq and Afghan wars. Sarkozy, in the wake of an apparent ambush which killed ten French soldiers east of Kabul, pulled out all the stops: just back from an after-action trip to Afghanistan where he met with troops who survived the firefight, he presided over a very moving midday ceremony in Paris, where he decorated the ten soldiers posthumously with the Legion of Honor.
He could not have done less. Sarkozy, though he reminded the audience that his predecessor Jacques Chirac had committed French troops to Afghanistan in 2001, is very much the author of France's policy to increase his country's combat role in the conflict. Part of Sarkozy's grand plan of simultaneously strengthening Europe's power projection capabilities while reintegrating into NATO's military command, the French role in Afghanistan is one of the key determinants of future NATO and EU plans for the anti-Taleban and anti-Al Qaeda effort.
Sarkozy, addressing the mostly military Invalides audience and beyond as "soldats," has had to deal with morale problems in the French military, smarting from a perceived lack of respect by this government bent on right-sizing and re-positioning France's sprawling military establishment. Now that the ceremonies are over, questions will abound about the extreme youth of many of the casualties (19-20 years old, very near the age of Sarkozy's own sons), their training and reinforcement, and the potentially fraught possibility of "friendly fire" from NATO (read US) aviation. France's domestic opposition will lose no opportunity to turn all of these into political footballs, with the vacation season almost over.
The French stance in Afghanistan - confirmed today by President Sarkozy and his ministers - will be of supreme interest to Senator Barack Obama, who has made success in Afghanistan one of the pillars of his security policy in his bid for the Presidency. Ten soldiers - the loss of which in American terms would equate to a one-day one-firefight list of 40 soldiers, not at all negligible - could have been sufficient to sabotage the French commitment. But Sarkozy is nothing if not determined. Today's high-profile, high-risk ceremony and eulogy was the polar opposite of Bush's out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach to military casualties. High-profile was the only way to go, to reinforce the message that there could be more, but that France and the West have too much invested in Afghanistan to give up. In recent days, French mapmakers have colored Taleban-controlled Afghanistan red. From a seeming rout in 2001-2002, Taleban Red colors half of the country.