ABSTRACT
The war in Afghanistan was caused by the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. At that time the Afghan government was hosting the terrorist group behind these attacks, al-Qaeda and its leader Osama Bin Laden. Afghanistan was not directly responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington but the simple fact that it was harboring Bin Laden made it a legitimate target for retaliation. The reaction in France following 9/11 was one of support and solidarity with the United States and the American people. On the September 13, the front-page editorial of Le Monde written by Jean-Marie Colombani was entitled “Nous Sommes Tous Américains” (We are all Americans). If this editorial was not without a fair share of warnings and criticisms, it was nonetheless a bold demonstration of support to the United States. This explains France’s backing of the American military intervention in Afghanistan to topple the Taliban government. On October 8, 2001, a group of French liaison officers was dispatched to the Central Command’s (CENTCOM) headquarters in Tampa and during October and November of the same year, the French defense system was gradually deployed on sea, in the air, and finally on the ground. The goal of this chapter is to present the way in which the French government tried to foster public support for its military intervention in Afghanistan between late 2001/early 2002 and early 2013. The puzzle driving the reflection is the following: given that France suffered relatively few casualties in the period analyzed (compared to other allied countries) and that the political culture, institutional setup, and strategic culture – the entire political climate – of France were all conducive to strong public backing, how does it come that the French public turned so strongly against the war in Afghanistan? One must keep in mind that the fading of public support is not new in the case of France as an older research on Bosnia demonstrated (Cohen with La Balme and Bruneteaux 1996). First of all, in order to understand France’s participation in the war in Afghanistan and the impact of the strategic narratives on its public
opinion, it is necessary to comprehend the influence of a few sociopolitical particularities of France: the first is the high degree of centralization of political power that gives French executive leaders a comfortable margin of autonomy in foreign affairs and the quasi-obsession of the French elite and decision-makers with the rank of France and its grandeur which tend to push them toward outside interventions in order to demonstrate French influence on les affaires du monde. The second is the importance of burden-sharing between allies (especially with the United States) linked to the security dilemma in alliance politics (Bennett, Lepgold, and Unger 1994, 1997; Snyder, 1984). The first particularity relates to domestic politics and the second to foreign policy and international politics. If the analysis does not focus on the security dilemma in alliance, the reader should keep in mind that it is the influence of these two conflicting characteristics and the government’s inability to create a compelling storyline about Afghanistan that were the major reasons behind the dropping support for Afghan intervention. And this, no matter how important is traditional public support for outside interventions in France. The chapter is divided in three sections. The first provides a brief overview of the evolution of France’s involvement in Afghanistan, the second presents the French advantageous “political climate” and the paradoxical declining public support, and the third underlines the inability of the governments to mount a compelling strategic narrative and its impact on public support.
