PARIS — In a confidential meeting of France's high-level defence council at the Élysée Palace today, President Nicolas Sarkozy is expected to consider a set of choices that could determine Canada's future role in Afghanistan, and possibly the fate of Stephen Harper's government.
Even though Mr. Harper has spoken to Mr. Sarkozy in recent days to urge him to send French troops to the battle-scarred south of Afghanistan to supplement beleaguered Canadian forces, it is unlikely the President's decision will be based on Canada's needs, French officials said yesterday.
Instead, France's decision will involve two larger strategic concerns: The ambition among French military leaders to establish a stronger European leadership role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the desire to win U.S. support for a European military force that could some day rival the U.S. military.
Mr. Harper has stated that Canada will end its 2,500-troop Afghanistan engagement on the official January, 2009, deadline if NATO is unable to provide an extra 1,000 soldiers to assist in fighting the Taliban in the increasingly dangerous Afghan south, where only Canada, Britain, the Netherlands and the United States have been willing to engage in large-scale active combat.
A failure of this ultimatum is likely to create a military crisis within NATO. It also has the possibility of jeopardizing Mr. Harper's minority government, since the opposition Liberals appear willing to back Mr. Harper's bill to extend the Afghan mission to 2011 only if another NATO country takes a leadership role in Kandahar.
French Defence Minister Hervé Morin suggested at a NATO summit last weekend that France might provide as many as 700 troops to join the Canadians in the south under one of several proposals being considered by the French government. This remains a "very likely" possibility, Mr. Morin's aides said yesterday.
But today's meeting, in which senior military officers, Defence Ministry and Foreign Affairs officials will outline various options they are considering for the deployment of the 1,500 French troops in Afghanistan, will shift the decision solely into the hands of Mr. Sarkozy, who met with a high-level Canadian delegation in Paris last week.
Even Mr. Sarkozy's ministers are unaware of the President's thinking on this matter, and he has stressed that he will not make his decision public until the NATO summit in Bucharest in early April.
And if the President does decide to send troops to the south - other officials prefer an option that would give France a prominent role in training Afghan soldiers - this would not end Canada's troubles.
French defence officials stressed in interviews yesterday that their military could not provide the full 1,000 troops that Canada believes is necessary to continue operations in Kandahar province; that French forces would serve for a limited length of time; and that France would first require commitments from other NATO nations to provide replacement forces after the French have departed.
In other words, Mr. Sarkozy's decision would serve as a lever to persuade other European nations to commit troops to active combat in the south. This, officials from France's Foreign and Defence ministries said, is Mr. Sarkozy's principal goal: to assume a leadership role in European military affairs, aligned with the United States but fully independent from the traditional U.S. leadership of NATO.
France is a strong advocate of the creation of an independent European defence force - effectively a military branch of the 27-nation European Union - that would be independent from NATO. But France, the third-largest military contributor to NATO, has not had any leadership position in the alliance since 1967, when then-president Charles de Gaulle withdrew from NATO leadership in a dispute over U.S. power.
After Mr. Sarkozy's government was elected last year, he decided to make this European defence force a priority, and to postpone NATO decisions until later this year.
But France's ambitions suffered a humiliating setback in recent months when French-led efforts to assemble a European Union peacekeeping mission to end the conflict in Chad were repeatedly delayed due to lack of co-operation.
It became apparent, officials and observers said, that France needed to establish a stronger military role in NATO first if it was to hope for an independent European force. On Saturday, Mr. Morin delivered an angry speech to European military leaders in Munich, calling on them to end their subservience to the United States.
"Europe does not assume enough responsibility, it simply falls into dependence [upon U.S. military goals]," he said, urging them to break out of the "infantile state in which they have been confined."
So if Canada ends up benefiting from France's new approach, it will be a side effect of a larger strategic goal. "Sarkozy was elected on this platform, to change the image of France," said Pierre Rousselin, the foreign editor of the newspaper Le Figaro, which has close ties to the government. "Of course, he is conscious that he cannot speak of having a bigger role in NATO, a bigger role for France in decision-making, and not contribute in a visible way to the Afghan battle."
