November 23, 2001	Friday	Ramazan 7, 1422

KABUL: The ironically-named Friendship Bridge linking Uzbekistan and Afghanistan remained closed on Wednesday. Mounds of barbed wire barred the way for tonnes of much-need food aid for the Afghans. Aid workers who turned up over the last fortnight with great hopes of finally making it into Afghanistan and getting on with their work have over the last few days given up and left Termez in disgust.

The closure of the Friendship Bridge - the only crossing over the Amu-Darya river - is the most visible sign of the differences between the US and Europe in the approach to Afghanistan.

Britain and other Europeans want to open up and secure routes into Afghanistan such as the Termez crossing to provide humanitarian aid to prevent millions of Afghans starving over the winter. The US sees the continuing hunt for Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network as the overriding priority and does not want to do anything that will detract from that effort.

It has left Tony Blair in an awkward position, having only last week talked up the prospect of thousands of British troops going in to Afghanistan on a humanitarian mission. He put 6,000 troops on 48-hour stand-by. The paratroopers were due to go in last weekend. This deployment has not happened and the fog of war round the corridors of power in London over the last week had been denser than usual, with ministers giving different accounts about the role of British troops.

The UK international development secretary, Clare Short, provided a shaft of light on Tuesday when she complained at a House of Commons select committee meeting about the lack of deployment. She reinforced the point in a BBC radio interview on Wednesday: “We and the French were ready to go. There has been delay and that is regrettable”.

The final decision on deployment rests not in Britain or elsewhere in Europe but with the US commander, General Tommy Franks. Coincidentally, he was in Uzbekistan on Wednesday where he said: “We are very hopeful that in the near term, perhaps a few days, perhaps a week, we will be able to open the Friendship Bridge which will bring an increased amount of humanitarian assistance.” For many, it has been too long already.

Several US aid officials said that Washington had not treated the food deliveries as a priority. Abby Spring, a spokeswoman for the World Food Programme said that military support was essential to allow aid groups to reach up to three million Afghans cut off by continued fighting, dangerous roads, and the deteriorating weather. “As long as the Taliban are on the road, then there can’t be security,” she said.

The Pentagon appears to be reluctant to allow allied troops to step in before the US has been able to declare victory over the Taliban and Al Qaeda, for fear of turning a US dominated operation into a joint international effort over which Washington would no longer have total control.

The US wants to keep the victorious Northern Alliance sweet, especially with talks beginning in Berlin next week between various Afghan groups aimed at creating a new broad-based government.

With this in mind, the US is anxious to avoid upsetting Northern Alliance sensibilities by sending in lots of foreign troops from the US, Britain, France and Italy. The dilemma is that the Berlin talks are set to last until Dec 7 and if deployment is delayed until then, winter will have arrived and many of the roads will blocked not by barbed wire, as at Termez, but by snow. The Northern Alliance resistance to foreign troops is partly because they do not want competition for power. But there is also a deep-rooted conviction uniting all members of the alliance - and, indeed, virtually all Afghans - that the cause of the woes of the last few decades has been foreign interference in their affairs.

If there is an assumption in western capitals that troops are essential to protect foreign aid workers, there is not conclusive evidence to back it up. While the mainly Pashtun regions to the east and south of Kabul are still unsafe, the areas under the direct control of the alliance - Kabul itself and most of the north of the country - appear to be reasonably free of banditry and renegade fighters.

But this view is not shared by the British Ministry of Defence. A UK defence source said on Wednesday: “One man on a hillside can take down a helicopter or destroy an armoured personnel carrier.” The source said bases would have to be established and ringfenced long before soldiers even thought about protecting roads.

Defence sources also insist that before British troops are deployed they must have a specific mission, whether it is humanitarian or a more direct security role. Tensions between UK and US were reflected by comments made by US Admiral John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations at the Pentagon, about the 100 troops of the Special Boat Service at the Bagram airbase.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.