Better late than never. France will - slowly - send its only nuclear aircraft carrier battle group to the Indian Ocean to help the war effort, the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, announced yesterday when the National Assembly undertook its post mortem on the war that has not yet ended.
But the Charles de Gaulle will not arrive in the region until mid-December. The timing is convenient, since Paris wants to avoid offending Muslims by participating in hostilities before the end of Ramadan.
In France, the Charles de Gaulle is a floating joke. Years late and billions of francs over budget, its landing strip was too short, nuclear reactors leaked radiation and a propeller broke off and sank in the Bermuda Triangle.
On November 8th, when President Chirac visited the ship in Toulon, two sailors were brought to hospital after inhaling toxic fumes.
Another detail seems to have escaped Mr Jospin's attention. One of the French battle group's missions is "to prevent the escape of terrorist leaders by sea", he said. Afghanistan has not an inch of coastline.
The French contribution to the Afghan war is going badly. Two-thirds of the 60 French soldiers who arrived in Uzbekistan on November 19th were supposed to be in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e-Sharif by now, to prepare the airport for a massive influx of humanitarian aid.
But the complexities of Central Asia stalled the French deployment. Uzbek officials say it is not clear whether the French role is humanitarian or military. If it is the former, then Uzbekistan would like some aid too please. If it is military, the Uzbeks say, then that's not what they agreed to; they were perplexed by Mr Chirac's earlier announcement that he was dispatching six Mirage 2000D ground attack aircraft to the region.
In the National Assembly debate, Mr Jean-Pierre ChevΦnement, the renegade left-winger who is spoiling the French presidential election campaign for both Mr Chirac and Mr Jospin, warned against confusion between humanitarian and military missions.
In Mazar, the rival Northern Alliance commanders, Gen Rashid Dustom and Gen Mohamed Mohaqiq, would rather that foreign troops not intervene in their little power struggle anyway. Meanwhile, 200 more French soldiers wait on a base in southern France, in theory bound for Northern Afghanistan.
Mr Jospin said he was sending the French chargΘ d'affaires back to Kabul today. France's junior minister for international co-operation headed for Tashkent yesterday in the hope of sorting the mess out.
The Gaullist deputy and former prime minister, Mr Alain JuppΘ, said he hoped "that French troops ... will get out of the somewhat ridiculous situation they're in".
Mr JuppΘ's constant tributes to Mr Chirac's role in the Afghan crisis were also somewhat ridiculous, but his criticism of Mr Blair drew loud applause.
"Sometimes, it is true, the omnipresence of the British inspired jealousy on this side of the Channel," Mr JuppΘ said.
Mr Alain Madelin, who is challenging Mr Chirac for the right-wing presidential nomination, boasted of his own trips to Afghanistan to support the late Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud. Mr Madelin, like the philosopher Bernard Henri-LΘvy, idolised Massoud and the Northern Alliance, whom they refer to as "the Resistance". Mr Madelin reproached French leaders for not doing more to help Massoud fight the Taliban.
