FRENCH troops in Afghanistan suffered one of their worst military defeats since the Algerian war of independence, leaving President Nicolas Sarkozy facing one of the biggest crises of his political career as he came under attack for supporting Nato against the Taliban.

Amid an unprecedented display of national doubt and soul-searching, parliamentary hearings on the French role in Afghanistan were being scheduled to address growing public concern about young men being used as “cannon fodder” in a war against a seemingly invincible enemy.

On Thursday Sarkozy, visibly shaken as he stood before the flag-draped coffins of 10 soldiers killed in an ambush, praised the bravery of young men “cut down in the flower of youth” and insisted that France would continue to pull its weight in the multinational Nato force that is struggling to keep the Taliban, or “barbarians”, as he called them, from power.

It emerged on Friday that 55% of the public want French troops out of Afghanistan and Sarkozy was under attack for having broken the promise he made during his election campaign last year to bring the troops home. Instead, he agreed in April to send an extra 700 after pleas for more help from America.

Until recently most of the blood being spilt in an increasingly vicious conflict has been British and American, while the French were operating in what was a relatively peaceful area in and around Kabul, the capital.

The French losses in a single battle on Monday were almost as great as their total of 14 casualties since 2001 and shocked the nation into the realisation that, rather than just another peace-keeping mission, Afghanistan was a real war.

“The government must stop sending children to their deaths in this slaughterhouse,” said Joël le Pahun, father of Julien, who was shot dead by a sniper on his 20th birthday when he went to the aid of a friend who had been wounded in the ambush. The friend later died.

Another 21 soldiers were injured in the battle, an extraordinarily high toll, and French generals were under pressure to explain what had gone wrong.

Why, for example, had no aerial reconnaissance been conducted before the convoy of up to 100 men set off towards the Uzbin valley on Monday afternoon, when this was known to be a potentially dangerous route? And why, after the fighting broke out, did it take so long for help to arrive and for the injured to be evacuated?

Adding to public outrage were allegations that some troops had been killed and injured by “friendly fire” when US special forces called in air strikes against the attackers.

Most of the soldiers who died were from the Eighth Parachute Regiment, whose baptism of fire was at Dien Bien Phu, the battle in northern Vietnam in 1954 that has gone down in history as one of France’s worst military debacles. “The eight”, as the regiment has come to be known, was almost entirely wiped out.

It was reborn in time to fight the Algerian rebels in 1956 and its men were at the front of a column of armoured vehicles that set off on Monday afternoon from the French base along the road linking Kabul with the Pakistani border. They were backed by Afghan army troops and a unit of American special forces.

About 30 miles east of Kabul, the column halted at 1.30pm so that scouts on foot could patrol ahead, where the road climbed in a series of hairpin bends to an altitude of 6,500ft.

Choked by clouds of red dust and in blazing heat, the men walked into an ambush in which several were picked off by snipers, including the radio operator.

The commanding officer was killed and his deputy was shot in the arm. The latter managed to operate the radio, calling for help. There was little cover, leaving the survivors exposed to Taliban guns.

Their isolation increased when the Taliban cut off their retreat by encircling their armoured vehicles. Reinforcements were summoned, as well as American jets. At 5.50pm, two American helicopters tried to evacuate the wounded but could not land because of gun-fire. It was not until 8pm that French helicopters were able to evacuate the wounded.

At 4am a French armoured vehicle helping to evacuate troops plunged into a ravine, killing a soldier.

At 9am the Taliban were still lobbing the occasional mortar at French positions despite the thunderous fire being hurled at them by two American A-10 “tankbusters”.

An estimated 40 Taliban were killed.

Sarkozy, addressing the coffins of the dead soldiers and their grieving relatives, said: “I want us to learn everything that we can from what happened [so that] none of your colleagues will ever find themselves in such a situation.”

It was the first time he had addressed an assembly of grieving war widows. He hopes it will be the last. President Hamid Karzai criticised US forces for “unilateral operations” after an attack killed 78 mourners at a wake.

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