Afstan: Let's hope President Sarkozy goes for the first option
That would be very encouraging and provide one of the three battalions ISAF says are needed in the south (via Norman's Spectator):
...A l’Élysée et la Défense, on planche sur deux options. La première consisterait en l’envoi du bataillon français dans une région du Sud, peut-être en appui des Néerlandais. D’autant que le mandat français dans la région «Centre» expire à l’été 2008. La deuxième option, pas forcément exclusive, serait de renvoyer 200 hommes des Forces spéciales dans le Sud. Ils en avaient été retirés début 2007...
posted by Mark, Ottawa at 5:07 p.m.
3 Comments:
Transration, prease!
John, roughly speaking, the article lays out two options being considered by the French gov't for Afghanistan. The first is to send a battalion of men to southern Afghanistan, possibly in support of the Dutch, as the French mandate in the Central region expires in the summer of 2008. The other option is to redeploy the 200 special forces troops to the south who were pulled out at the start of 2007.
Apologies for not translating as we go, but Canadian officers are required to have proficiency in both English and French, so it's often easier to just post the original text.
Of course, we don't really learn French up here, so much as Quebecois...sort of like the difference between English and Australian. ;)
It'd be nice to see France being a responsible member of the Western Alliance again. And why not BOTH the battalion AND the Special Forces? That wouldn't be more than 1,000 combatants, not an onerous burden for the French Republic.
But, I'm a skeptic. When we see French troops there, fighting alongside the (with a few honorable exceptions) mainly Anglophone troops, I'll believe it.
(BTW babbling brooks, I'm proud to say I remembered enough of my Yankee high school francais pour traduiser ca! Not 100% but fairly close. Also, my HS French teacher had lived in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne for a year. I don't think Quebecers and Cajuns would like to know what he thought of Quebecois and Cajun French :-)
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