PARIS, Feb 9: Some countries would appoint a parliamentary fact-finding mission. Others might ask a team of international aid experts. But to find out what war-torn Afghanistan needs most, only France would send a philosopher.

President Jacques Chirac and his prime minister, Lionel Jospin, this week entrusted France’s most flamboyant intellectual, Bernard Henri-Levy, with the mission of explaining to them “the expectations and needs of the Afghan people” and thus “contributing to the economic, political and cultural cooperation France can offer that country”.

“It is an honour, a heavy but beautiful honour,” said Mr Henri- Lev, who, after 20 years of fighting fascism, marxism, anti-semitism, totalitarianism, terrorism and fundamentalism from Bosnia to Bangladesh, is accorded the kind of adulation in France that most countries reserve for their rock stars.

“To those who say Afghanistan needs deeds not words, I say that there are words that carry the weight of deeds, texts that are also acts. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.