Some countries would appoint a parliamentary fact-finding mission. Others might ask a team of international aid experts. But to find out what war-torn Afghanistan needs most, only France would send a philosopher.
President Jacques Chirac and his prime minister, Lionel Jospin, this week entrusted France's most flamboyant intellectual, Bernard Henri-Lévy, with the mission of explaining to them "the expectations and needs of the Afghan people" and thus "contributing to the economic, political and cultural cooperation France can offer that country".
"It is an honour, a heavy but beautiful honour," said Mr Henri-Lévy, who, after 20 years of fighting fascism, marxism, anti-semitism, totalitarianism, terrorism and fundamentalism from Bosnia to Bangladesh, is accorded the kind of adulation in France that most countries reserve for their rock stars.
"To those who say Afghanistan needs deeds not words, I say that there are words that carry the weight of deeds, texts that are also acts. Look at some of the writers I admire most, Sartre, Malraux, Hemmingway - you never knew if they were writing their lives or living their books."
Following in a long French tradition of the "engaged intellectual", from Voltaire through Zola and Hugo to Sartre and De Beauvoir, Mr Henry-Lévy, known by his initials BHL, first shot to fame in the 1970s when he founded the New Philosophers group and its revolt against the leftwing thinkers dominant at the time.
He is a debonair fixture on French television talk shows, writes a weekly column in a leading magazine, and has published some 25 philosophical works includinga French bestseller titled Reflections on War, Evil and History published after September 11.
Born in Algeria in 1948, BHL has been fighting the good fight since 1971, when he was apparently the only Frenchman to answer André Malraux's call for an international brigade to fight in Bangladesh.
His first major book, Barbarism with a Human Face, caused a sensation in France in 1977, starting with a phrase that became a slogan for a generation: "I am the illegitimate child of a diabolical couple called fascism and Stalinism."
Since then, the showman-philosopher has helped set up Radio Free Kabul (in 1981), co-founded the anti-racism group SOS Racisme, launched many reviews and films (including the acclaimed A Day in the Death of Sarajevo).
"He's easy to attack, of course," said Liliane Lazar of the Simone de Beauvoir Association. "He's a provocateur and a media darling. His passion, eloquence and lyricism make him an easy target. But he has the gift of distilling the universal from the events of the day. He's on a permanent crusade for human dignity and you can't ignore him."
As part of his credentials for the job, BHL, 54, cites his long friendship with the late anti-Taliban resistance leader Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, whom he first met in 1982, and his many contacts in the Afghan resistance .
"France, at long last, is trying to do something for Afghanistan," he said. "I will listen to my friends there, then I will write up my findings.
"Even when philosophy went through its spinozist althusserian phase, it still believed thinking could equate to doing." The people of Afghanistan do not know what is about to hit them.
