Just a short time after Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke about Afghanistan, but his tone is completely different.

The efforts of the past few years could currently appear "in vain", said the Chancellor.

Macron, on the other hand, praises the work of the French army in the Hindu Kush: “Our struggle was fair.

He is a credit to the army ”.

Michaela Wiegel

Political correspondent based in Paris.

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The goal was not to impose a democracy on a sovereign country, "our clear goal was to fight the terrorist threat."

The French expressly thanked the Americans for their military engagement.

Initiative against uncontrolled refugee flows

In his address, recorded at the presidents' summer residence on the Côte d'Azur, Macron focused primarily on the future.

In August 2020, he received the Chancellor at the Bregançon fortress, which juts out of the Mediterranean.

Now he spoke to her on the phone and agreed that she and other Europeans would take the initiative to protect the EU from uncontrolled refugee flows from Afghanistan.

As an advisor to then President Francois Hollande, Macron had seen how much the refugee crisis in 2015 poisoned relations between EU countries. He therefore agreed with the Federal Chancellor to work out uniform criteria for admission. There have been significant differences in the assessment of asylum claims and protection status between Germany and France in recent months.

France has already brought around 800 local Afghan workers and their families into the country to protect them from acts of revenge by the Taliban, as Macron emphasized in his address.

Two French military transporters and French elite soldiers of the forces spéciales have been waiting at the French base in Abu Dhabi since Monday evening to land in Kabul and pick up other threatened Afghan aid workers and the last remaining French.

The French ambassador to Afghanistan, David Martinon, is coordinating the evacuation campaign directly from the military airport.

The EU representative is under the protection of French soldiers in Kabul, as is their Afghan staff.

Another “safe haven” for terrorists?

Macron emphasized in his speech that the development in Afghanistan represented a "turning point". It is now the task of the international community to prevent the country from becoming a "safe haven" for terrorists again under Taliban rule. In a conversation with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, he agreed on a British-French initiative in the UN Security Council. Its main aim is to be more closely involved in American planning. Macron's main concern is that the American withdrawal from the world's trouble spots could continue.

He is more afraid of a new American isolationism than of imperialism, because he knows that the fight against terror in the Sahel cannot continue without America. Eight months before the presidential election, however, Macron was primarily targeting the domestic audience, who are increasingly skeptical about military deployments abroad. That is why it was so important to the French to defend the honor of the soldiers who risked their lives in the Hindu Kush.

France, however, had always played a special role. If President Jacques Chirac was one of the first to commit troops in October 2001, he withdrew the special forces at the end of 2006. In 2011, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced a gradual withdrawal of troops. At the end of 2014, the French army ended its mission in Afghanistan, "in coordination with the Afghan government," as Macron emphasized.