KABUL, Dec 9: The UN Special Representative to Afghanistan said on Tuesday Afghanistan’s first elections, scheduled for next year, should be postponed until the right conditions were created to hold them.

Lakhdar Brahimi, an architect of Afghanistan’s 2001 peace plan who will leave office at the end of the month, said if security improved to a reasonable level, it would be possible to hold presidential elections “by the end of next summer”.

But speaking to Reuters in an interview, he said if the conditions were not right, the polls, supposed to take place next June, should be delayed further.

“I am not looking for a Swiss election, but on the other hand, you don’t want a farce,” he said.

Brahimi also called for 5,000 more international peacekeeping troops to be deployed around the country, a near doubling of the 5,700-strong International Security Assistance Force mainly stationed in Kabul.

“Elections are extremely important, absolutely indispensable, but they have got to take place at a time and in a manner that they do contribute to an improvement in the situation,” he said.

“If you do them at the wrong time and in the wrong manner, beware that they do not take you backward.”

“You can’t have national radio in the hands of factions and pretend to have free and fair elections,” he said.

“You need to have security, and security is not only physical, because you can have perfect physical security, but then soldiers come and tell you: ‘vote right’.”

The United Nations began registration of an estimated 10.5 million voters last month, but Brahimi said this was already slowing given security problems in the provinces, which are plagued by Islamic insurgency and warlord rivalries.

Brahimi said improving security required more international peacekeepers and for Afghans and their foreign partners to speed up efforts to create an Afghan National Army and police force.

In addition, he said, there was a need for a more structured programme of national reconciliation to make government more representative and for warlord armies to be disbanded.

Brahimi said the United Nations had been pressing for more peacekeepers since just after the current government was formed in late 2001.

“I think we are being heard now,” he said, but the UN hoped additional deployments did not end up as “too little too late”.

He said Washington now saw the need to build a viable state and was no longer solely focused on catching those responsible for the September 11 attacks. That change was “very, very welcome,” he said.

Brahimi’s replacement had yet to be announced, but diplomats say among the favourites is Britain’s Major General Sir John McColl, who set up the international peacekeeping force in 2001, and a former foreign minister of Jordan.

Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister, said he was neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the country he was leaving.

“One has to be realistic,” he said. “If you are asking me whether I think Afghanistan can ultimately stand on its own two feet, then I think the answer is definitely yes.

“I think this peace process is difficult, bumpy, messy at times, but I think it is going in the right direction and if both the Afghans and their international partners have that combination of determination and patience, I think it will work.”—Reuters