The French military? That's an old joke

Steven Erlanger and Alissa Rubin have an article in The New York Times about the French:

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France suspended military training and assistance for Afghan forces and said he would consider an early withdrawal from Afghanistan after an Afghan soldier shot and killed four French soldiers on a base in eastern Afghanistan. The attack was the latest in a series of episodes in which Afghan soldiers or police officers, or insurgents wearing official uniforms, have opened fire on soldiers of the American-led coalition in Afghanistan.
The killings are intended to sap Western morale and hasten the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan sooner than an agreed NATO deadline of the end of 2014, when Afghan forces are supposed to be ready to defend the country on their own. A rising number of the attacks have also been born of simmering animosity between coalition forces and the Afghan soldiers they fight alongside and train.
With many European countries facing unprecedented economic pressures at home, such attacks by Afghan soldiers on foreign troops have added to public questioning of the value of continued involvement in Afghanistan. If France were to reduce its troops early or precipitously, it could spur other countries to follow suit, Western and Afghan officials warned. France has been a firm ally of the United States in Afghanistan, with the fourth-largest contingent of troops, according to NATO figures, and 82 French soldiers have died, many of them killed fighting in Kapisa Province in eastern Afghanistan, where Friday’s shooting occurred.
Facing a fierce battle for his re-election, Sarkozy said that security had better improve in Afghanistan for France to stay. “If security conditions are not established clearly, then the question of an early return of the French Army will arise,” he told diplomats in a foreign affairs speech at the Élysée Palace. “It will be a difficult decision that we will have to take in the coming days, but I have to do it while being able to face the French public and our soldiers.” France and its army “is at the side of its allies, but we cannot accept that a single one of our soldiers be killed or wounded by our allies,” he said. “It is unacceptable; I will not accept it.”
Sarkozy’s main rival, the Socialist Party candidate François Hollande, who is leading in the polls for the spring vote, immediately repeated his call for French troops to pull out of Afghanistan by the end of the year, a break with NATO solidarity.
The sense of French wavering was felt strongly in Kabul. Sarkozy’s talk of leaving early, even if rhetorical, “is not very good in terms of alliance cohesion,” said a Western official in Kabul, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. An early French withdrawal could lay bare “real cracks in the coalition,” the official said, at a time when the alliance is seeking a cohesive position to end the war.
NATO is trying to convince the Afghan government of its long-term commitment, while pushing the Taliban insurgents to negotiate a peace deal rather than continue fighting. Both efforts have been only moderately successful. There is no question that the patience of America’s NATO allies with the expensive, deadly Afghan war has been running out. They joined the war alongside the United States, which had been attacked by al-Qaeda on 11 September 2001, from its sanctuaries in Afghanistan. But the Taliban government is long gone, Osama bin Laden is dead, and al-Qaeda has been diminished and mostly pushed into Pakistan.
Washington, too, is looking for a dignified exit.
Sarkozy has already rejected earlier American requests to add to the 3,900 French troops currently in Afghanistan, according to NATO. While he has withdrawn forces in parallel proportion with the United States, he is widely expected to accelerate those withdrawals. He has already said that he will pull out 1,200 troops this year.
The killings of allied forces by Afghan soldiers have added to the sense that after a decade of war even supposedly sympathetic Afghans would like to see the foreigners gone.
Friday’s episode appeared to be the second fatal attack in a month involving an Afghan soldier firing on French troops. On 29 December, two French soldiers were killed by a man wearing an Afghan uniform, who was shot dead.
On Friday, the gunman turned his weapon on unarmed French troops, according to an Afghan police official in Kapisa Province and Lieutenant Colonel Michel Sabatier, a spokesman for French forces in Afghanistan.
Colonel Sabatier told news agencies that the 35 French troops, embedded with Afghans at a base in Gwan, were not wearing body armor when the Afghan soldier opened fire with an automatic weapon. The gunman is in custody, a NATO official said. Eight of the fifteen who were wounded are in serious condition, the colonel said.
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan said he was “grieved by the incident” and confirmed that an initial investigation indicated that the gunman was an Afghan National Army soldier.
Last week, a senior French official, asked about Afghanistan, said the French public was wondering how long its troops needed to stay in the face of Afghan resentment. “We have made a lot of sacrifices in lives and money, and yet it’s very difficult to foresee a lasting solution there,” the official said.
Germany harbors similar doubts. While they are the third-largest contingent, German troops do little ground fighting and mostly train Afghan personnel. The German Parliament will vote next week on a government proposal to reduce its forces to 4,400 by the end of 2012 from just under five thousand. German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, in Washington, said the death of the French soldiers would not change those plans. “Such tragic setbacks must not weaken our determination or divert us from our commitment to peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan,” he said in a statement.
Italy, with the fifth-largest contingent, will continue a “gradual reduction” of troops through 2014, “in accord with allies as part of official strategy,” said Maurizio Massari, the Italian Foreign Ministry spokesman. He said he had no comment about French policy decisions. “We stick to the principles that decisions should be taken in NATO,” he said. “We do what we agreed in NATO. If other countries decide something else, that’s their decision.”
Britain, whose 9,500 troops are the second-largest contribution to the war effort in Afghanistan, has had troops killed in similar attacks to the one that took the lives of the four French soldiers. In all, 395 British military personnel have died in the conflict, also the second highest for any of the 49 nations contributing troops to the NATO-led alliance. The casualties have been a major factor in widespread popular support for an early withdrawal of British troops, as reflected in a long string of opinion polls and a restiveness in Parliament. But Prime Minister David Cameron is less politically exposed on the issue than Sarkozy, with no likelihood of an election in Britain before 2015. He has said that such deaths will not speed Britain’s timetable, which aims for ending all combat operations by December of 2014, when Afghan forces are scheduled to have assumed responsibility for fighting the Taliban. This year, five hundred British troops will be brought home.

Rico says there's a Bill Mauldin cartoon from WW2 that says a convoy should be careful because "the French have been reported on the roads"; not much has changed in 60+ years...