Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is still feuding with France and Germany long after he dismissed them as “old Europe” and courted smaller countries like Bulgaria in his effort to build a coalition to fight the war in Iraq.

Times have changed. That war is supposedly over, if one can disregard almost daily sniper and grenade attacks. So is the war in Afghanistan, if one can forget that the American-sponsored government controls little more than just the capital, Kabul, with warlords and Taliban remnants struggling over the rest of the country.

The United States still has 9,000 troops in Afghanistan, but they were trained for high-tech combat, not the new vital low-tech tasks of street patrols and nation building. That’s the job for the new 29-nation, 5,200-troop International Security Assistance Force. And who has supplied those peacekeeping soldiers? More than half of them came from Germany, with 2,300, and France, with 500 plus another 50 helping at the U.S. Military Training Center in Kabul. Ten “new Europe” ex-communist countries from Estonia to Albania have supplied only about 170. The Wall Street Journal reported those figures last week and noted that Mr. Rumsfeld, in a recent speech on security cooperation, made no mention of France and Germany but boasted about Romania’s minor contribution.

The Journal told of a visit to Kabul by the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner. When he stopped in at an American-led training camp for Afghan soldiers, he was greeted by a French officer. The Virginia Republican, a strong supporter of the Bush war policies, asked an aide, “What are they doing here? They muckin’ things up again?” A U.S. military official said he told Sen. Warner, “If they weren’t here, we’d be failing.”

Knight Ridder Newspapers reported last week that Mr. Rumsfeld vetoed a U.S. Air Force plan to invite the French air force chief to a prestigious September conference of air force commanders from around the world. French diplomats complained to the State Department and the White House. The same report said that Mr. Rumsfeld had restricted U.S. participation in this month’s Paris Air Show, prohibiting attendance by senior American officers and barring U.S. demonstration flights. It reported that the Defense Department had also disinvited France from a major U.S. air exercise next year.

The Knight Ridder report quoted senior administration officials, who wouldn’t let their names be used, as telling of a March 28 meeting in which President Bush rejected punitive actions Mr. Rumsfeld had proposed in an 11-page memo, finding them too harsh. They included recalling all U.S. military liaison officers from France and sending home 60 French military liaison officers, canceling any U.S.-French exercises, ending U.S. Navy port calls in France and French navy port calls in the United States, and suspending a number of cooperative projects and intelligence-sharing programs.

Understandably, Mr. Rumsfeld was stung by French and German outspoken opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq. He may be doubly stung by worldwide perception that they were right, and their early observations that rebuilding Afghanistan and Iraq would be tough jobs lasting many years cannot sit well either.

But it is beyond time for the defense secretary to realize that France and Germany are mainstays in this arduous postwar effort. We need them just as they need us.