The soldiers were killed in a major battle that erupted when Taliban insurgents ambushed a French patrol just 60km east of the Afghan capital on Monday. The fighting has heightened fears the militants are gradually closing in on Kabul itself.
“The best way of remaining faithful to your comrades is to continue the work, to lift your heads, to be professional,” Sarkozy told French troops at a base on the outskirts of Kabul.
“I don’t have any doubt about that. We have to be here.”
Sarkozy sent an extra 700 troops to Afghanistan this year, responding to US pleas for its NATO allies to do more to help check the resurgent Taliban. That brought the number of French troops in Afghanistan to about 2,600.
“I tell you in all conscience, if it had to be done again, I would do it,” he said.
Sarkozy said the work the troops were doing was vital.
“A part of the world’s freedom is at stake here. This is where the fight against terrorism is being waged,” he said. “We are not here against the Afghans. We are with the Afghans so as not to leave them alone in the face of barbarism.”
In a visit which lasted a few hours, Sarkozy first paid his respects to the dead soldiers. He then visited the 21 French soldiers wounded in the battle and held talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai before leaving the country.
Sanctuaries & training grounds
Karzai said he was “tremendously saddened and shaken” by the deaths and expressed his condolences to the French people.
“The rise in violence is attributed directly to our lack of attention, the allies and all of us, to the sanctuaries, to the training grounds, to the financial resources, of terrorists and the Taliban,” Karzai told reporters.
“Unless we do that we will continue to suffer,” he said.
Sarkozy was accompanied on the trip by Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, Defence Minister Herve Morin and the French armed forces chief, General Jean-Louis Georgelin.
“I have come to share your grief, to join in with your indescribable pain ... as do the whole French people, which has been shaken by the heavy toll from this ambush,” Sarkozy told French troops. “When something happens to you, I feel responsible.”
The loss of 10 troops was the worst suffered by the French army in a single incident since 58 paratroops were killed by a suicide bomber in Lebanon in 1983 and the worst in combat with enemy forces since the Algerian war that ended in 1962.
It was also the worst single loss in combat for troops from NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan since US-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in the wake of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
Monday’s ambush took to 24 the number of French soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2002.
The bodies of the 10 French troops are being repatriated to France, officials said.
Call for contemplation
France's opposition Socialists called on Wednesday for a debate over French strategy in Afghanistan.
Socialist party leader Francois Hollande, who had previously criticised Sarkozy's decision to send an extra 700 troops to the region, said parliament's foreign affairs and defence committee should meet, although he held back from urging a pullout.
“It is a moment for contemplation, for solidarity with the families of the victims, for compassion with families who are affected and homage to our soldiers in Afghanistan,” Hollande told France Inter radio.
“But there also has to be a time for reflection on the sense of our presence in Afghanistan,” he said. “I think we have to redefine the mission and set precise objectives.”
“The priority should first be reconstruction, rebuilding Afghanistan and above all training the Afghan army.”
French television carried live coverage of the arrival of some of the most seriously wounded in Paris and a commemoration was planned on Thursday at Les Invalides, the golden-domed palace that houses monuments to France's war dead.
Flags flew at half mast in the southwestern town of Castres, where the 8th Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment, the unit in which most of the killed and wounded served, is based.
Calls for a pullout have so far come only from the extremes of the political spectrum, from the Communist party and from the leader of the far-right National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Editorialists in most of the main newspapers said the deaths should not call into question a mission that left-wing daily Liberation called a “tragic necessity”.—Reuters