November 19, 2001	Monday	Ramazan 3, 1422

WASHINGTON: As the triumphant Northern Alliance sets about forming a single-faction government in Kabul, a perilous vacuum has opened up this weekend as the United Nations remains absent from Kabul and no plan for running the postwar nation emerges from the back rooms of Washington.

With the military campaign streaking ahead of political strategy, the Northern Alliance - made up of Uzbek and Tajik tribes - threatens to present the international community with a fait accompli following its dramatic capture of Kabul, last weekend. This impression was added to on Saturday with the arrival in Kabul of the former Afghan President, Burhanuddin Rabbani, for the first time since he was driven from power by the Taliban in 1996.

Meanwhile, rival Pakhtoon tribal leaders said on Saturday that they will never accept ceding power to the Uzbeks and Tajiks. In response, the Bush administration continues to wrangle over what kind of force will keep the peace, and who will administer postwar Afghanistan.

The United Nations’ special envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, accuses the Alliance of obstructing the nation-building process, but has failed to convene his all-Afghan convention and called off a special mission to Kabul on Friday by Frances Vendrell, his special representative.

A senior UN official said on Friday that, even if it did elect to become the de facto police force of postwar Afghanistan, ”there is no way the UN could deploy a peacekeeping force in less than many months.”

The official also said that such a mandate would “depend on what the relationship was between such a force and the massive humanitarian operation, and whatever political presence the US had maintained.”

Those close to the process issued strong words of warning last week that a multinational force must be quickly created to keep the peace and prevent the Northern Alliance from becoming the country’s new government. While those with experience of peacekeeping urge the United Nations to accept the role, sources at the UN say it is unwilling to do so, and cannot in the future.

Although the US military is prepared to support the relief effort, Pentagon sources say there is extreme reluctance among generals to contribute large numbers of US troops to a security force - a position that reflects a long-standing reluctance to become involved in peacekeeping missions.

“In terms of taking US forces and having them become part of a semi-permanent peacekeeping activity in the country, I think that’s highly unlikely,” said Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The US administration is divided over who it thinks should rule liberated territory. The Pentagon favours allowing the Alliance to provide internal security in the north, at least - a view the British and French do not accept. Secretary of State Colin Powell is also opposed, say officials, and favours an international, all-Islamic security force.

His State Department - wary of the Northern Alliance - is struggling alongside the CIA to put together what Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca insists must be “a broad-based government in Afghanistan” including the Pakhtoon.

One spectre that haunts US thinking is Kosovo, where backing for the Albanian KLA is seen in most circles as initially justified, but as having created a vindictive danger of a kind the Alliance could repeat.

And one man keeping an eagle eye on the present situation - and meeting Rumsfeld - is the former commander of American forces in Bosnia and later part of the peacekeeping effort in Kosovo, General Bill Nash, now senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Nash sees the US and international community facing two urgent duties: first, the ‘external’ campaign against territory controlled by the Taliban or Al Qaeda, “in other words carrying on the war - that is the role of the US and Britain. We’ve got to keep it up and pursue the war on terror. But even as we’re doing that, we need to transition the non-Taliban area, and for this there’ll be some need of coercion, because we cannot allow any one faction to take control.” This was a lesson learnt in Kosovo: ”We cannot allow the victim to become the aggressor.”

The second duty, therefore, is the ‘internal defence’ of liberated territory, ‘guarantee public security’. Based on his experience, says General Nash, this is the key to fighting the war on terror, “because war is fought for a political purpose and if we don’t go into Afghanistan and make life better for the citizens of Afghanistan, after all they’ve been through, we’re not fighting the war on terrorism.”

Internal defence, says Nash, ”should be the task of a multinational force - non-US, non-British, non-Russian and non-Pakistani. It has to be the United Nations, so as to demonstrate that this is not the imperialist occupation of Afghanistan. Yes, I do think the UN is capable, despite the sin of failure in Bosnia. The men I worked with in Kosovo were excellent, from Bulgaria or wherever.”

Nash gave his interview before UN envoy Brahimi, who had previously opposed the idea of an international military presence, said last week that there was no time to put together an all-Afghan force and that “such a presence, provided that it includes adequately trained and armed units ready to defend their mandate, could ensure security.”

However, Brahimi and the UN show no sign or willingness to deploy a UN peacekeeping force. One of the experienced US diplomats in regular contact with Brahimi is Nancy Soderberg, former ambassador to the United Nations, pivotal broker of the Irish peace process for the Clinton administration, and now with the International Crisis Group.

Soderberg gave a warning of the danger in “eliminating the Taliban without a clear plan as to what comes next, and I’m not confident that the Bush administration have such a plan. Just because the Taliban are ousted militarily, they are not going to stop fighting. There is nothing wrong with nation-building,” she says, “it was what we did after World War Two to great effect.” —Dawn/The Observer News Service.