PARIS, Feb 28: Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai spent his first day in Paris reminiscing about the academic year spent in France back in 1985-1986, when he was a student at the country’s leading journalism school, the Ecole Superieure de Journalism de Lille.

At a luncheon held in his honour at the Elysee Palace, he made use of his sometimes halting French to tell his host, President Jacques Chirac, that it was the year spent in France that largely shaped his ideas on “peace, security, democracy — respect for the rights of man and woman”.

During the more serious parts of his exchange with Chirac, Karzai was told that France was ready to prolong the deployment of its troops in Afghanistan beyond April 30, when they were scheduled to return home.

Karzai said that France would probably be asked to train one or two battalions of Afghanistan’s future national army, and also would be asked to undertake a number of infrastructure projects, notably in the energy sector.

But, above all, Karzai told Chirac that if he were in Paris, it was not so much to talk figures as culture. “Our cultural cooperation with France goes back ages,” Karzai said. “As for myself,” he continued, “I’d rather not have to measure our level of cooperation in dollars, but rather in terms of culture.”

Which is perhaps why Karzai’s first order of business here was the inauguration, with President Chirac, of a spectacular exhibition, at the Musee Guimet, devoted to a thousand years of Afghan Art.

Many of the sculptures having been rescued by French archaeologists in recent years from the hands of the Taliban who, it was feared, might have destroyed them, they still remained the property of Afghanistan, the provisional president was told by Musee Guimet officials, and would be returned to the country whenever Karzai wanted.

He was indeed given a few of the pieces belonging to the legendary Bagram treasure that had been removed, for safekeeping, from the national Museum of Kabul, objects that had been preserved from destruction with the assistance of Unesco.