France threatens to pull out of Afghanistan Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president, has threatened to withdraw his country's troops from Afghanistan and suspended military training and assistance for its nascent security forces after four French soldiers were killed by an Afghan soldier on Friday. The shootings, which left eight other French troops injured, are the latest in a series of incidents in which members of Afghanistan's security forces - or in some cases insurgents posing as police officers or soldiers - have opened fire on Nato personnel. "I cannot accept that Afghan soldiers fired on French soldiers, " Mr Sarkozy said at a meeting of diplomatic staff in Paris, adding that the incident raised the question of an "early return of the French army." "It's a difficult decision that we will have to take in the coming days, but I have to do it while being able to face the French public and our soldiers," he added. The Afghan war is more unpopular than ever in France after 26 soldiers were killed in operation last year, the country's heaviest losses since the conflict began. François Hollande, Mr Sarkozy's rival in the forthcoming presidential election, has promised to accelerate the withdrawal of troops should he win power, adding to the pressure on Mr Sarkozy to respond. Mr Hollande said on Friday that he would bring troops out "at the latest by the end of 2012." By contrast, Mr Sarkozy has said he would follow the US approach in progressively reducing forces between now and 2014. France has 3,600 soldiers in the country after withdrawing 400 troops since October. It plans for a further reduction of about 1,000 this year. Gérard Longuet, the French defence minister, has been dispatched to Afghanistan immediately, while Mr Sarkozy said his country's continued presence there would be top of the agenda at a meeting this month with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president. France's troops are heavily involved in training the Afghan army, who are scheduled to take over in 2014 when the vast majority of Nato combat troops are due to have left. However, the frequency of attacks by trained Afghan troops on coalition forces has fuelled broader doubts over whether the US strategy of rapidly building up Afghan forces can succeed in stabilising the country before 2014, In one of the worst examples, an Afghan military pilot killed eight US troops and a US civilian contractor in April last year. Last month, an Afghan soldier killed two members of France's Foreign Legion before he was himself gunned down. Earlier in January, a man in an Afghan army uniform shot and killed a US service member at a base in the south of the country. The killings and many others like them have underscored the animosity that sometimes erupts between foreign troops and the Afghan forces they are training to shoulder the burden of fighting the Taliban. Mr Karzai condemned the killing and offered his condolences to France, his office said.