But Algeria does have a place to send its Arab/Muslim malcontents - France.
You don't know what you're talking about. I was in Marseille in 1968. I was caught in the middle of a three-way battle between the OAS, the Algerian nationalists, and gendarmes. And I have never been so-scared in all my life, and this was less than a year after I saw action in Vietnam. There was, for all intents and purposes, a civil war in France in 1968. So don't chalk up the loss of Algeria to "cowardice," because if they're anything, the French are some of the most ridiculously beligerant folks on the planet.