ON PATROL:
An Italian member of the NATO-led ISAF force in Afghanistan
Even before 1966, when Charles de Gaulle pulled his country out of NATO's integrated military command structure, France had a complex relationship with the Atlantic alliance. Since then, it retains a seat at the table in diplomatic and political terms, but doesn't take part in defense planning. President Jacques Chirac demonstrated France's diffident stance in 1999 by intervening in the setting of targets during the NATO air campaign against Serbia, and again last year by leading efforts to block the dispatch of air-defense systems to Turkey before the invasion of Iraq. So there was an inevitable whiff of irony around French...
