Global Policy Forum

By William Shawcross

IT WAS extraordinary but fortuitous timing that the Nobel Committee this weekend awarded the 100th Peace Prize to Kofi Annan and the United Nations which he heads. The UN is about to face one of its largest challenges ever - rebuilding Afghanistan.

In its statement the Nobel Committee stated that it "wishes in its centenary year to proclaim that the only negotiable route to global peace and co -operation goes by way of the United Nations." It praised Annan himself for having been "pre-eminent in bringing new life to the UN".

Annan has indeed transformed the United Nations. It is no longer the wretched place of low morale, low reputation, low expectations that was left behind by Boutros Boutros Ghali after the United States forced him out in 1996. I first met Annan in the mid-1990s in the Balkans when he was head of the UN's peacekeeping department. One thing which stood out was his uncanny ability to get people to change their positions without feeling threatened. He has an extraordinary calm and persuasive manner, never hectoring, emollient, but not weak. Since he became Secretary General he has attempted (with mixed results) to reform the baronies that make up the UN system. He has published self-critical investigations of such terrible UN failures as the massacre at Srebrenica and the genocide in Rwanda. He has concentrated on the need to fight the worldwide scourge of HIV/AIDS, he has spoken out for the poor and he has attempted to make universal human rights "the touchstone of my work." He has established a relationship with the UN's greatest critic, Washington, which many people thought impossible in 1996, and persuaded the US to pay most of its debt to the UN. He has restored the morale of the UN and he has given the world an international leader whom it can genuinely admire.

Annan has been admirably robust in his response to the mass murders of September 11. Now, with the resulting, necessary war on terrorism and the war in Afghanistan, he may face his greatest test.

The humanitarian crisis in and around Afghanistan is deteriorating sharply with millions of people at risk as war compounds the rush of winter. By the middle of November - only a month away - the snows will cut off large areas of the country and the people within them.

In his press conference on Thursday night President George W Bush said for the first time that when the Taliban was routed, the UN could come in and create a stable new government. He said that he agreed with Tony Blair that a broad-based government must be created. He said it would be useful "for the UN to take over this so-called nation building - I would call it the stablisation of a future government - after our military mission is complete." Bush was endorsing similar remarks by Tony Blair. Their ambition is to create a broad -based government that truly reflects the tribal and political complexity of Afghanistan. Easily said, very difficult to do.

Look at the examples of recent attempts by the international community to rebuild failed states. In Somalia the UN saved at least hundreds of thousands of people from famine. But when it and the US tried to intervene in Somali clan politics they were bloodily beaten off and Somalia dissolved. Cambodia was better. There, at the beginning of the 1990s the UN established a virtual trusteeship under which all the different factions were to co-operate with a large UN mission, disarm, participate in UN elections, observe the result and build a new society. The elections were well run but the losers, the re -labelled communists, ignored the results and continue to hold most power to this day. The UN's mission helped Cambodians but did not transform their lives.

Somewhat more successful was Kosovo, where the UN has helped to build a new multi-ethnic administration. But neither the UN nor its NATO partners have been able to prevent a pattern of violence on the part of the previous victims, the Albanian Kosovars against their previous tormentors, the Serbs. In East Timor, perhaps the easiest "nation-building" mission, the UN has been running the country since Indonesia finally withdrew after the bloody referendum of 1999. UN officials have been guiding the tiny territory towards independence which will come in February; there the situation is eased by the small scale (there are fewer than a million people), there is political unity and the UN faces no military threat inside East Timor. Afghanistan, by contrast will be the mother of all missions.

Last week I talked to Lakhdar Brahimi, the Algerian diplomat whom Kofi Annan has appointed his Special Representative for Afghanistan. He is the man whom Annan charged with reforming UN peacekeeping after the debacles in Bosnia and Rwanda. As a result of recommendations, an Afghan Task Force has already been set up to co-ordinate the UN agencies' response.

It is Brahimi's job to put together an interim administration or UN Trusteeship. He has had the job before - he resigned from it in frustration. He knows all the players and their utterly adversarial agendas. He also knows that for most of them the wishes of 'the international community' are meaningless. What matters above all are the regional powers - Russia, which supports the Northern Alliance, and above all Pakistan, which created and supported the Taliban until now.

Winter will very soon inhibit movement except by the most nimble - like ousted Taliban troops or Osama bin Laden's Arab terrorists seeking revenge in small guerrilla groups. The Taliban are now reckoned to have 40,000 troops, many of them Arabs or other mercenaries paid for by Bin Laden. Pentagon analysts hope these troops will break up under pressure, many of them defecting to their main enemy, the Northern Alliance. But this weekend the Taliban vowed to fight to the end. Small Taliban and al-Qa'ada groups could continue a destructive hit-and-run civil war for years.

The immediate fear is of creating a security vacuum. When the Taliban first came to power in 1996 they were welcomed by many Afghans because they imposed a kind of order upon the tribal, warlord chaos into which the country had descended. There is a real fear such chaos could be revisited on Afghanistan now. The Taliban's principal foes are the Northern Alliance . The coalition knows that if the Alliance took Kabul it would not be able to maintain order there.

Hope must lie in a power-sharing arrangement between various tribal enemies, probably under the auspices of Zahir Shah, the exiled 86-year-old king in Rome. He is seen as the only symbolic figure who might, in theory, be able to unite defectors from the Pashtun Taliban with the Uzbeks, Hazaras and other minority tribes from the Northern Alliance.

That is the rosy scenario. As we saw in the 1990s, enemies do not easily become friends - not in Somalia, not in the Balkans, not in Cambodia. We cannot make a failed state into Michigan or the Netherlands overnight simply because we wish it.

The UN has had nation building thrust upon it. In any such operation people are the key. The right personnel are very hard to find, even in the easiest missions. Cambodia and East Timor were paid holidays by comparison with Afghanistan.

To begin with, who will send the peacekeeping troops? Many UN missions depend on Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. They cannot be used for obvious reasons. Perhaps Jordan, another UN stalwart, would send troops, perhaps some of the UN's African contributors such as Nigeria or Kenya. Wherever they come from, any such deployment would take at least three months.

And what of the civil side? What policemen will want to go to Kabul? (Any volunteers from Glasgow?) Where will the UN find the financial experts, the teachers, the administrators of a massive reconstruction programme?

But before any of these can begin to be recruited, security must be provided. Without that neither the King, nor Brahimi, nor anyone else can do anything.

Last week Brahimi was well aware of the difficulties of his mission. He told the story of a man climbing a palm tree in the desert, with his shoes slung over his shoulder. Asked why he did not leave them on the sand, he replied "So I won't have to come back for them if I find a way out at the top."

We all have to climb trees now, looking for Afghanistan's way out.

. William Shawcross is on the board of the International Crisis Group. His most recent book is Deliver Us From Evil: Warlords and Peacekeepers in a World of Endless Conflict

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