Reading all of this now has me wondering how on earth we have managed in the 'Stan for all these years without a carrier.
The reason the French carrier
Charles de Gaulle needs a maintenance period is that she and her air group had been providing CAS for ground forces in AFG (mostly Brits in Helmand) since October 2010, her fifth such mission in nine years. She only had a couple of weeks in Toulon before providing over a quarter of the NATO strike sorties over Libya to date. US Navy carriers have been providing CAS and ISTAR in AFG continuously since 2001.