Another Taliban propaganda coup/Aussies attacked

Courtesy Paris Match [h/t to Jack MacLeod]:

A French magazine published photos [Update: link no longer seems to work] on Thursday of Taliban fighters with trophies taken from French soldiers killed last month in Afghanistan, setting off a new round of pained debate about France's presence there.

President Nicolas Sarkozy and his ministers have said again and again since 10 French soldiers were killed in an ambush on August 18 [interesting article at this link] that France would not falter in its determination to fight the "medieval" and "barbaric" Taliban.

But the pledges ring hollow in the ears of many French people who are suddenly being served blanket coverage of a faraway conflict involving about 2,600 French soldiers that had previously been confined to the inside pages of newspapers.

The weekly magazine Paris Match rekindled emotions with its spread of photos of Taliban fighters displaying French army guns, uniforms, helmets, a walkie-talkie and a wristwatch they said were taken from dead soldiers during the August 18 ambush.

"It's a shock to see our children's killers parading their uniforms, their weapons," said Joel Lepahun, the father of one of the dead soldiers, on RTL radio.

Defence Minister Herve Morin suggested the magazine's reporters had done the Taliban a favour in the propaganda war.

"Should we be doing the Taliban's promotion for them?" he said during an interview on France Inter radio.

"The Taliban are waging a war of communication with this kind of operation. They have understood that public opinion is probably the Achilles' heel of the international community that is present in Afghanistan," he said.

Eric de Lavarene, the journalist who arranged the meeting with the Taliban fighters and interviewed their leader, defended himself against accusations that he was manipulated by them.

"I wouldn't say that. No one talks of propaganda when we set off embedded with NATO troops, yet information is always very tightly controlled on those occasions," he said on i-Tele TV.

"However it is true that the Taliban have become masters in the art of communication," he added...

And the Aussies have just taken a major hit:

AN Australian special forces soldier is fighting for his life after a Taliban ambush in Afghanistan in which eight others were wounded - the highest number of injuries suffered by Diggers in a single battle since the Vietnam War.

An unknown number of Taliban fighters was also killed in the clash in Oruzgan province.

Defence spokesman Brian Dawson yesterday said the attack on Tuesday night left one member of the Special Operations Task Group with critical injuries, five of his comrades seriously wounded and another three with slight wounds.

The ambush follows recent military success by Australian special forces in targeting Taliban leaders.

Last month, special forces' soldiers successfully co-ordinated an airstrike that killed Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mohamed, a senior insurgent commander in Oruzgan province.

Another operation in August resulted in the capture by Australian special forces of Mullah Bari Ghul, a key figure in providing equipment, arms, money and foreign fighters to the conflict in Oruzgan.

In Tuesday's attack, Taliban fighters fired on the Diggers with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades as they were travelling in a vehicle convoy with other international soldiers.

All the wounded were members of the 300-strong special forces group based in Oruzgan in southern Afghanistan.

Not since the battles of Balmoral and Coral in 1968 - during the Vietnam conflict - have so many Australian solders been wounded in one incident.

The attack takes to 52 the number of Australian soldiers wounded in action in Afghanistan since the start of combat operations in 2002.

Six Diggers have been killed...

The Taliban certainly are putting the pressure on--ambushes against several countries' troops now in addition to IEDs. As I wrote in an interjection at an earlier post:

I've had it from someone knowledgeable that there is indeed a qualitative change in recent Taliban activity, and that they are likely to keep going all out, staging from their Pakistan sanctuaries, until the Afghan presidential elections late next year in an effort to disrupt and discredit them--not a pretty prospect.

It's now clearly a battle for Western hearts and minds too.

Update: A Paris Match photo (via tomahawk6)

Upperdate: Four of the ten French dead may have been murdered. H/t to Fred.