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| Afghanistan | |
| France to boost aid to Afghanistan - Books and pencils, no troops | |
| 2009-03-31 | |
| PARIS (AP) -- France is ready to quadruple its civilian aid to Afghanistan to shore up schools and other nonmilitary institutions -- but is not ready to send any more troops despite U.S. pressure, an official said Thursday. The new French pledge comes as representatives of 70 nations were meeting in the Netherlands to discuss Afghanistan's future in hopes of creating a new impetus to quash the growing Taliban insurgency. France will boost its aid this year to Afghanistan's civilian institutions including schools and hospitals to $53 million from the current euro10 million, French Foreign Ministry spokesman Eric Chevallier said in Paris on Tuesday. France is seeking to bring its aid to the levels of its European counterparts, he said. But he reiterated France's resistance to providing more troops. "There is no prospect of increasing our military presence," Chevallier told a news conference. He insisted however that France was not backing off its Afghanistan commitment. "There is no set date for our withdrawal from Afghanistan," he said. "There is still work to be done." France's opposition to bigger troops numbers puts it at odds with the United States, which is pouring thousands more troops into the Afghan theater, just as France and Germany are set to host a NATO summit on Friday and Saturday. President Barack Obama has urged European allies to come up with more firepower for Afghanistan, while France is seeking to use its " France has 3,300 troops in Afghanistan. Of those 2,800 are in ISAF, the NATO-led force -- a third of the level of Britain's ISAF troops and one-tenth the size of the American force. France's envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Pierre Lellouche, was quoted as saying that the French military force would be "reshuffled" after the Afghan presidential elections in August to make it "more robust and more coherent." He gave no signal however of an increase in troop numbers, and has insisted in the past that they wouldn't been raised. Lellouche was quoted in the daily La Croix as saying Europeans "have not really taken the baton" in Afghanistan because of anger over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
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| Posted by:GolfBravoUSMC |