The French like to quote a sentence taken from de Gaulle’s Mémoires de Guerre: ‘I approached the complicated Middle East with straightforward ideas.’ Nine centuries after the capture of Jerusalem by Frankish knights, their successors have learned one thing: cohabitation with the Muslim world, which geography and particularly civilizations based on common roots makes inevitable, will never be easy. The United States’s mistake is to deny this fact. This American reductionism explains not only its own past and present failures but also those towards which France is heading in its thoughtless and untimely choice of partner. We are heading for a major Franco-American falling-out.

The Afghan Quagmire

Over seven years ago, when the Afghan War had just begun, we penned an article entitled ‘La Guerre Introuvable'⁽¹⁾ (The obscure war). Failure was already visible in the over-the-top and self-sustaining media hype. By deploying all its technological resources, it was clear that the United States sought, in addition to taking revenge for the 2001 attacks, to validate its American Way of War and in the process to save NATO; not only that, but also to wipe out previous humiliations. Richard Nixon wrote a long self-justifying piece 25 years ago entitled ‘No More Vietnams’. It can be summed up in its last couple of sentences: ‘This could mean that we will never try again. It must mean that we will never fail again.’

But it takes more than one to make war, and the reviews and White Papers are based more on military introspection than strategic thought. It is not the Taliban that is beating us but our vanity in declaring that we have entered a new world with new paradigms (a fine word much used and abused by George W. Bush), and that logical procedures are now obsolete. However, a military occupation is still an occupation, unacceptable by its very nature. The French understand this for historical reasons; the Americans refuse to countenance it. Their ability to repeat others’ mistakes is exceeded only by their capacity to repeat their own, from Saigon to Kabul. What do they know of Afghanistan? Their forebears in Vietnam had an advantage: they spent their pay in the go-go bars of the country, learned a few words of French, ate and loved in Vietnamese style. The soldiers of 2009 call on ethnologists or even anthropologists to try to understand what the Afghan population is thinking. This betrays an inherent racism, while in fact the Taliban think no differently of the presence of foreign soldiers on their doorstep than did the American colonists facing British Redcoats. There is no special cultural feature in this, still less a religious one.