CAIRO, Nov 14: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Wednesday ruled out sending troops to Afghanistan as part of a US-proposed Muslim peacekeeping force, saying he feared they might return to Egypt as “terrorists”.
“If the United States wants a peacekeeping force, it is better to look to Muslim countries from east Asia,” Mubarak said in remarks reported by the state-run Middle East News Agency (MENA).
“We have already sent people to Afghanistan as fighters, and they returned here as terrorists, and we don’t want to create new terrorists,” Mubarak said.
He was alluding to Egyptian radicals who went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupation in the 1980s only to return to Egypt in the 1990s to wage a violent campaign against Egypt’s secular-led government.
In a Tuesday interview with the New York Times, US Secretary of State Colin Powell proposed sending an international “coalition of the willing” led by soldiers from Muslim nations to secure Kabul.
In the interview published before Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance, Powell said Turkey, Indonesia and Bangladesh had proposed to take part.
The UN special representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, also suggested that an international security presence be deployed which would protect major cities and fill the void left by the Taliban’s collapse.
Egypt has contributed to several international peacekeeping forces, particularly in Bosnia and Somalia, but Cairo has repeatedly said that it planned no military role in the US-led war.
However, Mubarak said he backed a government representing all the ethnic groups in Afghanistan.
“I hope stability will take hold, because the fall of Kabul does not mean the affair is over,” Mubarak told reporters during the inauguration of a rail bridge over the Suez Canal.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher told the government daily Al-Ahram that “we support the efforts deployed by ... Brahimi to reach an understanding among the warring Afghan parties and create the bases of a new political system.
“The Afghan people must themselves choose their government, and it must not be imposed by anyone”.
Brahimi called on Tuesday upon the UN Security Council to hold an international conference involving the ethnic minorities in the Northern Alliance, as well as the supporters of the exiled former king, Mohammed Zaher Shah, and various opposition groups.—AFP
