President Sarkozy met widespread opposition yesterday to his plans to send new combat troops to join Nato in Afghanistan as his Prime Minister pledged “several hundred” extra troops to the mission.

François Fillon's announcement in parliament marks the first time that a senior French official has publicly put a figure to the size of the reinforcement. France had initially been expected to send an extra 1,000 troops in addition to its 1,500 soldiers serving mainly around Kabul. Mr Sarkozy is to decide the final total at the Nato summit, French officials said.

In a bitter parliamentary debate, Mr Fillon said that France expected to send extra troops because “peace in Afghanistan will largely condition our security, and thus our freedom”. He insisted that France had a duty to help to defeat Taleban forces and al-Qaeda, adding: “It is a difficult combat, but a just one.”

Emboldened by public hostility to the deployment, the Socialist opposition denounced Mr Sarkozy for taking France into “a new Vietnam” and waging war merely to win favour with Washington.

According to a BVA opinion poll yesterday, only 15 per cent of the public back the deployment, which Mr Sarkozy announced in London last week and will flesh out at the Nato summit in Bucharest.

Jean-Marc Ayrault, the Socialist parliamentary leader, called a no-confidence vote in the Government and told the National Assembly that Mr Sarkozy's strategy had “little to do with Afghanistan, more with his obsession with closer ties with the United States”. The campaign was doomed to failure and even opposed by sections of the French military, Mr Ayrault said. The confidence motion has no chance of being passed, but it drew attention to discontent with Mr Sarkozy's plan to add to French forces.

Dissident backbenchers in Mr Sarkozy's own camp also attacked the President. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, a nationalist who has resigned from Mr Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement, joined the Socialists in accusing the President of betraying the practice of foreign-policy independence that was founded in the 1960s by Charles de Gaulle. “Afghanistan is a military quagmire. All foreign chiefs of staff agree that the US way of conducting the war will lead to failure,” he said.

Mr Sarkozy is shifting closer to Nato and Washington after four decades of French semi-detachment from the alliance. He aims to take France back into the integrated military command next year.

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