PARIS, Aug 2 (Reuters) - Pakistan's president travels to Paris on Monday for talks with counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy focused on Islamabad's role in combating terrorism and the security of French troops fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Ties with Pakistan have been clouded by a French law banning Muslim women from wearing the veil in public places and a police probe linked to a deadly 2002 bomb attack in Karachi which killed 11 French nationals.
But France will want primarily to discuss the safety of its forces in Afghanistan, its concerns heightened by the leak of classified U.S. military reports by the WikiLeaks website which have fuelled Western doubts about Islamabad’s reliability.
The reports detailed concerns that Pakistan’s intelligence service aided the Taliban insurgents that French forces are fighting in Afghanistan, even as the government in Islamabad was taking billions of dollars in U.S. aid.
French officials have said little in public about the WikiLeaks reports but the Foreign Ministry said President Asif Ali Zardari’s visit would allow Paris to "tackle questions of security and the fight against terrorism, the regional situation, as well as economic cooperation" with Pakistan.
"We have to hope that President Sarkozy will talk about the Afghan question," said Christophe Jaffrelot, senior research fellow at the Centre for International Studies and Research at the Sciences Po institute in Paris.
"Pakistan has two sides to it, which sometimes puts our troops in danger," he told France Info radio. "Objectively, it is our ally. All our reinforcements pass through there but at the same time it uses all the resources from the West to conduct its own policies and back Islamic groups, including the Afghan Taliban."
France, which has 3,500 troops in Afghanistan, has lost 45 soldiers in Afghanistan since it took part in the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 to oust the Islamist Taliban movement and fight its al Qaeda allies.
Zardari’s visit to Paris has been overshadowed by his trip later in the week to Britain, whose Prime Minister David Cameron has infuriated Pakistan by suggesting Islamabad was not doing enough to fight terrorism.
Pakistan on Monday summoned Britain’s ambassador over the remarks and has rejected such criticism as misguided.
FRENCH RELATIONS
Franco-Pakistan ties have also cooled across other areas in recent weeks. Hundreds of Muslims protested in Karachi in July to protest the approval by the French lower house of parliament of a ban on the wearing of full-length veils.
A book published in May on a 2002 bomb attack in Karachi that killed 11 French naval engineers sparked fresh controversy in Paris. It suggested the attacks were carried out by Pakistani military after kickbacks to Pakistani officials were stopped.
In February, the Paris prosecutor said police had opened an inquiry into whether kickbacks from submarine sales to Pakistan had helped fund the 1995 presidential campaign of Edouard Balladur. His campaign manager was Sarkozy, who has dismissed the suggestion of any wrongdoing as a "fable".
France also has commercial interests to discuss with Pakistan’s leader. Zardari’s May 2009 visit appeared to result in a nuclear cooperation agreement possibly leading to a wide-ranging deal to buy civilian nuclear equipment.
The deal, billed as similar to the one struck by the United States with Pakistan’s arch rival India, raised concerns that sensitive technology could leak out given Pakistan is not a member of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). French officials later said they had only agreed to cooperate with Pakistan on nuclear safety.
