Global Policy Forum

By Michael R. Gordon

Pentagon officials who long opposed expanding the international security force in Afghanistan now say that enlarging it and placing its troops outside Kabul may help secure the country and allow American troops to leave sooner, senior Bush administration officials said today.

The shift, officials said, may be necessary because of the lingering difficulties in rebuilding the country and establishing law and order in a nation still wracked by banditry, warlords and renegade Taliban fighters. One senior Bush administration official described the shift as a "mid-course correction."

The change in the Pentagon's thinking is an important precondition for other nations to contribute troops for a peacekeeping effort that would extend beyond the Afghan capital, Kabul. Foreign nations have been reluctant to consider such a venture until the Pentagon agrees to help with logistics, command and control and intelligence, and promises to withdraw the peacekeepers if they are endangered. American officials said that steps to enlarge the peacekeeping force might not come for months and that finding nations to contribute the forces would not be easy.

Even if the force is expanded, it is likely to be more modest than the one proposed by the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, blunting but probably not ending the debate over whether the Bush administration has done enough to rebuild Afghanistan.

American officials say a number of ideas are under consideration, all of which would involve American support, but not troops. They include setting up a mobile group of peacekeepers, which could be whisked from Kabul to trouble spots. Another idea is to place peacekeepers in several cities outside Kabul, like Mazar-i-Sharif, where there are tensions between rival warlords.

A sizable deployment of peacekeeping forces in all the major Afghan cities is the least likely possibility, American officials say. The Bush administration itself has not offered to place American peacekeepers in Afghanistan. It has also had a tough time finding another nation to lead the force once Turkey's command expires this year.

One of the first hints of the Pentagon's shift came early this week when Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the head of the United States Central Command, discussed expanding the peacekeeping force. "There are in fact views and a number of places that would indicate the desirability of expanding the International Security Assistance Force," he said at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul. The deputy defense secretary, Paul D. Wolfowitz, also signaled a new receptivity to expanding the force in an interview with the British Daily Telegraph. "We are looking very seriously at what might be done if we get more contributions to ISAF," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "At the moment the issue is sustaining ISAF first. Expanding it is valuable, but it cannot be the first priority."

Expanding the force beyond Kabul has been a contentious issue within the administration. President Karzai has urged an extension to Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, Kandahar in the south, Herat in the west and Jalalabad in the east. State Department officials were generally supportive. Richard N. Haass, the director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning, told the World Economic Forum in February that the force might be expanded to as many as 25,000 troops spread around Afghanistan. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain said Mr. Karzai had made a persuasive case for expanding beyond Kabul.

But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his aides resisted the idea, fearing it would tie down American forces and extend the stay of American troops in Afghanistan, even though American troops would be cast largely in a supporting role. Mr. Rumsfeld pushed for setting up an Afghan army as the solution to the country's security problems, saying that would enable the Afghans to become more self sufficient. American Special Forces in Afghanistan and United States Civil Affairs teams were also asked to use their influence with local warlords to bring calm in the country.

"The question is, Do you want to put your time and effort and money into the International Security Assistance Force — go take it from, say, 5,000 to 20,000 people?" Mr. Rumsfeld said in February. "Another school of thought, which is where my brain is, is that why put all the time and money and effort in that? Why not put it into helping them develop a national army so that they can look out for themselves over time?" But the establishment of the Afghan army has gone slowly. The Pentagon says that army will number only 3,000 to 4,000 soldiers by the end of this year. Meanwhile, local warlords have continued to erode the authority of the central government in Kabul.

Problems in restoring order and delays in providing money from international donors have slowed efforts to rebuild the country, develop the economy and establish the rule of law. As a result, reconstruction has fallen well behind the pace in Kosovo after NATO's confrontation with Serbia.

"The creation of the Afghan army is a distant prospect," said James Dobbins, who served as the Bush administration envoy for Afghanistan and is now a senior official at the Rand Corporation, a government-financed research center. "There has not been a high enough level of security outside of Kabul to allow reconstruction outside the capital."

The slow pace has not been lost on the Pentagon, where officials are well aware that it will be harder for American forces to leave the country unless the economy develops, Mr. Karzai's authority is reinforced and warlords are reined in. As these efforts have lagged, Mr. Rumsfeld has sought to rebut criticism that the Pentagon has not been doing enough. Earlier this month, he asserted that he had no objection to enlarging the peacekeeping force if other nations were willing to contribute the troops. But he did not offer to provide the logistical support and security guarantees that foreign nations say would be needed to encourage them to contribute more peacekeepers or to take an active role in organizing an expansion of the force.

The main problem, Mr. Rumsfeld said, was that foreign nations have provided relatively little of the $4.5 billion in aid they promised to rebuild the country. At the State Department today, a senior official said European nations had failed to contribute the necessary food aid.

"The U.S is the champion and the predominate financial supporter of the multilateral relief and recovery program in Afghanistan," said Gene Dewey, the assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration. "We desperately need our flagging, all too unilateralist allies, especially from Europe, to join the multilateral bandwagon and come up to their fair share."

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