Attack on French troops highlights Afghan hurdles

The gunning down of 19 French soldiers by one of their Afghan colleagues Friday highlighted the hurdles facing NATO troops as they prepare to pull out of the war-torn country.

Four soldiers were killed and 15 others wounded in the attack in their base in eastern Afghanistan as they ended an unarmed work-out session, prompting a furious response from French President Nicholas Sarkozy.

He said he would consider pulling French troops out of Afghanistan earlier than planned and suspended military training of Afghan troops — a crucial element in plans for a 2014 pull-out by US-led NATO forces.

The whole basis for the withdrawal of some 130,000 foreign troops is that Afghan security forces will be trained to take over responsibility for defending their country against an insurgency by hardline Taliban Islamists.

Sarkozy’s suspension of the training of Afghan soldiers and threat to pull out his troops early could be a problem for the other nations involved in the US-led coalition fighting the Taliban, said analyst Kate Clark.

“No nation’s forces are anywhere comparable to the Americans, but relative to everyone else the French are a relatively big contingent so this is important,” said Clark, of the Afghanistan Analysts’ Network.

“You can understand why the French feel like this, but at the same time it doesn’t look good having one nation talking about pulling out early.”

She said attacks by Afghan soldiers on their foreign counterparts were seldom ideological but stemmed from personal antagonism and arguments.

“That makes them quite difficult to deal with. And when you’ve got foreign troops, particularly doing training, there is no way of avoiding hanging out together and plenty of opportunity to rub each other up the wrong way.

“The drive to rapidly increase the size of the army also causes strains in the system,” she said.

The Taliban, ousted from power by a 2001 US-led invasion after the attacks on New York and Washington, gleefully leapt on Sarkozy’s reaction, claiming the French president had “ordered a halt to the mission of his invading forces”.

Spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid, without claiming that the Taliban were responsible for the attack, said “the invading enemy should realise that they cannot protect themselves from the anger and wrath of Afghans anywhere”.

“Brave and patriotic soldiers who still have kept their Afghan and Islamic honour in their hearts… have been conducting attacks on the foreign soldiers,” he said in a statement on the group’s website.

Retired Afghan general Atiqullah Amarkheil, now a political and security analyst, said “this strong reaction by the French President Sarkozy will only boost the morale of the Taliban and their supporters”.

“Unfortunately, it will give them another propaganda tool, they will claim in the coming days that their action, the blows they dealt, have pushed back and shaken a powerful country like France,” he told AFP.

Amarkheil said he did not believe an end to the French mission would have “any crippling effect on the Afghan army”.

“We already have more than 180,000 soldiers and officers,” he said.

A spokesman for the Afghan defence ministry said the aim was to have a total of 250,000 Afghan army troops in uniform by the time foreign forces pull out in three years.

Indicating the speed of the build-up, the Afghan army and police together have grown from around 190,000 in late 2009 to more than 305,000, as part of plans designed to peak combined numbers at 352,000 by November 2012.

Armakheil’s surprise at Sarkozy’s strong reaction was also prompted by the fact that there have been several similar incidents over the years.

Since 2009, according to an AFP count, a total of 41 coalition troops have been killed by Afghan security forces, mostly in small groups.

France has 3,600 troops in Afghanistan, while the United States has close to 100,000.