France to pull out troops from Kabul

BRUSSELS, Friday

President Nicolas Sarkozy announced on Friday that “several hundred” French troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan before the end of 2011.

“Between now and the end of the year, early next year, several hundred French soldiers will return to France in full agreement with the decision taken by the US president,” Sarkozy told a news conference at the close of a two-day European Union summit.
His office had said Thursday that France would carry out a progressive pullback of its 4,000 troops “in a proportional manner and in a timeframe similar to the pullback of the American reinforcements.”

US President Barack Obama on Wednesday ordered all 33,000 US surge troops home from Afghanistan by next summer and declared the beginning of the end of the war, saying the withdrawal would begin this July.

Sarkozy said he shared Obama’s belief that security had improved since the death of Osama bin Laden and that the handover to Afghan troops and police was taking smoothly.

Should the situation improve, the pullout of all Western combat troops in 2014 might be “brought forward”, he said.

The French President also delivered a scathing parting shot to outgoing US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, saying his criticism of the Nato alliance reflected the “bitterness” of a future retiree.

Sarkozy hit back at Gates two weeks after the US defence chief rebuked European allies for their reliance on US military might,

warning that they were putting the Libya mission and Nato’s very future at risk.

“Mr Gates was heading towards retirement and it gave him pleasure” to criticise the alliance, Sarkozy said at the news

conference.

“You can’t blame someone who’s retiring for showing bitterness,” he said.

“His retirement caused him to not clearly see what was going on in Libya,” the clearly offended French leader said, adding that

“it was particularly inappropriate for Gates to say this. Plus, it was completely false.”

Gates, who retires next week, painted a bleak picture of the state of the transatlantic alliance during his last visit to Brussels,

saying Nato risked a “dismal” future after years of shrinking budgets.

“The mightiest military alliance in history is only 11 weeks into an operation against a poorly armed regime in a sparsely

populated country — yet many allies are beginning to run short of munitions, requiring the US, once more, to make up the difference,” Gates said in a June 10 speech.