French Premier Backs Vote on Deployment in Afghanistan

PARIS — Responding to new concerns about the French military presence in Afghanistan after the deaths of 10 soldiers there in a Taliban ambush, Prime Minister François Fillon said on Friday that he would support a parliamentary vote in September on the troop deployment in line with recent constitutional changes.

Parliament, which is dominated by the conservative party of President Nicolas Sarkozy and Mr. Fillon, is expected to approve the continued involvement of French troops. But the vote is a gesture to public concern. It would take place after a parliamentary debate on Afghanistan beginning Sept. 22.

The vote would take place under new rules requiring parliamentary approval for any military deployment overseas that lasts more than four months. Mr. Fillon would apply the new rules to the Afghan deployment, even though it began before the constitutional changes were made, in order to hold the vote.

On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Defense Minister Hervé Morin will testify before a special joint session of the foreign and defense committees of the lower house of Parliament on France’s Afghanistan policy.

Mr. Sarkozy has strongly defended the need for France to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan alongside its Western allies as part of the fight against terrorism and for the rights of Afghan women. But his promise in April to commit an additional 700 French troops, bringing the total to nearly 3,000, was not popular.

After the ambush this week in which 10 French soldiers were killed and 21 wounded, the worst death toll for French forces in a military attack since 1983, the French news media have lavished attention on Afghanistan, driving Georgia and Russia off the front pages. The dead, the wounded and their families have received plenty of coverage, and Mr. Sarkozy presided over an elegant memorial service on Thursday at the Invalides.

“We don’t have the right to lose there,” Mr. Sarkozy said. France “is not a country like others,” he said. The dead, he said, “gave their lives, far from their country, to do their duty, for freedom of the rights of man, for the universal values that are at the heart of our republic.” Mr. Sarkozy said the soldiers were engaged “in an essential battle against barbarism, obscurantism and terrorism.”

An opinion poll published Friday in Le Parisien, taken by the CSA polling agency after the deaths, showed that 55 percent of respondents wanted France to leave Afghanistan, while about 36 percent said France should stay.

But those numbers are not very different from another opinion poll taken by IFOP in early April, which found 55 percent were opposed to reinforcing the French troops already in Afghanistan. Only 51 percent thought international forces should be in Afghanistan at all. Both polls interviewed samples of 1,000 people over 18.

French and NATO officials have denied reports from a wounded soldier, published in Le Monde, that the French were fired on by allied forces and that help was unduly late in arriving.