Global Policy Forum

By Evelyn Leopold

U.N. Security Council members are drawing up resolutions that would endorse quickly an accord reached among Afghan factions but hold off on a peacekeeping force until the United States allows one, diplomats said on Wednesday.

One resolution would be a straightforward one endorsing the Bonn agreement and signaling willingness to help with security. But a second one actually authorizing a multinational force would have to wait until council members Britain and France persuaded the United States to accept one.

Afghan factions, meeting for more than a week under U.N. auspices in Bonn, Germany, put aside two decades of war and chose a broad-based government, including an interim prime minister, to lead the shattered nation before free elections.

The accord also envisions a multinational peacekeeping force that the 15-member Security Council would mandate but not organize. The well-armed troops are intended to help maintain order in the capital Kabul and surrounding areas, and accelerate humanitarian aid, an urgency as winter sets in.

Countries joining them would include Britain, France, Germany, Turkey and possibly Jordan as well as other European nations. An all-Muslim force, as some have suggested, has been excluded by most U.N. officials, including Lakhdar Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister and the chief negotiator for the Bonn talks.

But the newfound willingness of the Northern Alliance, which controls most of Afghanistan, to accept international peacekeepers has not yet persuaded Gen. Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, which oversees the war in Afghanistan, that the time is ripe for outside forces in areas freed from control of the Taliban militia that had ruled the nation.

His first requirement is to root out the Taliban and the al Qaeda network and find the hiding place of Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden, accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 hijacked plane attacks in the United States.

"The challenge will be working out how two military operations can overlap," said one European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. "No one is prepared to wait indefinitely and allow the political process to deteriorate but they could go in stages, with Kabul first."

A conclusion of the agreement also would remove Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin Rabbani from Afghanistan's seat at the United Nations. Rabbani, who is in Kabul, repeatedly had delayed progress at the conference, unwilling to step down.

But after pressure from his colleagues, as well as German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, he reluctantly embraced the agreement.

Representatives of Rabbani, head of the Jamiat-i-Islami party, the backbone of the Northern Alliance, held the U.N. seat in the 1990s because most of the world refused to recognize the Taliban, which took power in Kabul in 1996. Consequently, Rabbani had remained the internationally recognized president of Afghanistan.

Diplomats said no action was required for the new coalition to present its credentials to Secretary-General Kofi Annan and take its place in the 189-member General Assembly.

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