After pledging to speed up France’s pullout from Afghanistan, incoming president Francois Hollande will soon have to reassure NATO allies about his decision to end combat earlier than planned.
Hollande made a campaign promise to start bringing 3,300 French soldiers home this year, ending his country’s combat role two years earlier than NATO’s carefully crafted plan to fully hand security control to Afghans by 2014. “I believe that, without taking any risks for our troops, it is the right thing to withdraw our combat troops by the end of 2012,” Hollande said last week.
The Socialist leader will bring this message to fellow NATO leaders when they meet at a summit hosted by US President Barack Obama in Chicago on May 20-21, just days after his oath of office.
NATO military officials say the alliance had already made contingency plans in the event Hollande defeated right-wing incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy. Nevertheless, a diplomat acknowledged that the new leader’s stance “was not warmly welcomed” at alliance headquarters.
Afghan officials downplayed Hollande’s pledge, insisting that Afghan forces will be ready to take over security responsibility in 2013 and doubting that France has enough time to complete a withdrawal by the end of this year anyway.
But the early French pullout challenges NATO assurances that there would be no “rush to the exit” in Afghanistan, even though the war is unpopular in the West after a decade of fighting that has killed almost 3,000 foreign troops. In Chicago, NATO wants to show a united front, repeating its “in together, out together” mantra as it fine-tunes the final straight of a mission that has yet to defeat the Taliban despite the presence of 130,000 foreign troops.
Canada and the Netherlands have already switched to training missions while Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard indicated last month that her troops could begin leaving as early as next year. Sarkozy himself had surprised some allies by deciding earlier this year to end France’s combat mission in 2013 after four French troops were killed by a rogue Afghan soldier.
Hollande has insisted that France would coordinate with NATO allies to avoid leaving a security vacuum when French soldiers pack up and leave Kapisa province, northeast of Kabul.
“I will do this in good cooperation with our allies,” said Hollande.
Francois Heisbourg, special advisor at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, said the NATO alliance wanted to avoid any drama as it attempted a smooth withdrawal from Afghanistan, even if success was uncertain in the end.