It was like rubbing salt into a festering wound.

Not only did French Prime Minister Francois Fillon refuse to consider a timetabled withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan on Monday; he also told Parliament 100 more of them will be dispatched to shore up NATO's troubled mission.

The Socialist Party's decision to vote against keeping French troops in the fight against Islamic terrorism looked all the more impotent after the President Nicolas Sarkozy's ruling UMP easily won the day.

But opposition figures like Jean-Marc Ayrault, the Socialist leader of the Assembly, raised valid points about exactly why President Nicolas Sarkozy decided to send more soldiers to Afghanistan.

He talked about a lack of a coherent strategy to turn the former Taliban run state into a place where NATO would like people to "enjoy representative government and peace and security."

Afghanistan doesn't look much like that right now, despite what Francois Fillon told the debate about record numbers of children going to school and women having the opportunity to take part in public life.

NATO is struggling against a well-organised and emboldened enemy which is mounting more and more audacious attacks and advancing into places that were supposed to be secure.

Insurgents are taking advantage of the failure by neighbouring Pakistan to stop militants crossing back and forth freely between the borders to find sanctuary in tribal areas.

Of course, France learned just how good its enemy has become in the most painful way imaginable, when ten of their soldiers killed in an ambush last month.

It was a huge loss of life for a country that had only recently beefed up its presence in Afghanistan.
And it made Monday's Parliamentary debate all the more emotive and timely.

It followed the leak of a classified NATO report which stated the French soldiers were ill-equipped for their fatal reconnaissance mission.

Ayrault claimed this war cannot be won without hundreds of thousands of extra troops.

That would chime with the senior US general on the ground who thinks the US will need more than ten thousand more soldiers in 2009.

But France is cutting its military personnel by 50 thousand, so deploying a substantial force to Afghanistan isn't an option.
And last week a poll for the weekly news magazine L'Express showed 62 per cent of the French public wanted out of Afghanistan.

If Francois Fillon is correct in his prediction that more coffins will return home shrouded in Tricolore flags, it may just be the voting public who bring an end to the French operation, rather than al Qaeda or the Taliban.