France’s President pays unannounced visit to Afghanistan.

French President Francois Hollande made an unannounced trip to Afghanistan on Friday to visit some of the French troops he wants to pull out later this year and meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whom he saw briefly last week in Chicago, Chicago Tribune said.

Hollande, making a whirl of foreign trips since his May 15 inauguration, is accelerating the withdrawal of the roughly 3,400 French troops still stationed in Afghanistan to the end of this year, two years ahead of the NATO timetable.

His office said he would pledge to keep to a long-term cooperation treaty signed with Kabul earlier this year.

Hollande's new withdrawal timetable is at odds with NATO partners adhering to a plan to hand over command of all combat missions to Afghan forces by the middle of 2013 and withdraw most of the 130,000 foreign troops there by the end of 2014.