WASHINGTON: Simply handing off all or parts of Afghanistanto the UN once the bombing stops would be a terrible idea. The nation-building ability of the UN rests on certain conditions being met - conditions that it lacks the capacity to produce.

What are those requirements in Afghanistan? First, the existence of a viable political framework, guaranteed by Afghanistan’s neighbours and the major powers and enshrined in a UN Security Council resolution. Second, a willingness by all parties to back it with sufficient military muscle against the inevitable challenges, in all likelihood including guerrilla attacks by hard-core Taliban forces.

Afghanistan is not East Timor, or Kosovo. It is a difficult place to govern under the best of circumstances. Its politics are tribal and its coalitions unstable. Hostility to outside intervention is strong. The terrain is forbidding. And the country is awash with arms, left over from the war against the Soviet Union.

The UN is severely limited by its member states in the kinds of military operations it can undertake. Governments voluntarily supply UN peacekeepers, or not, once the Security Council adopts a mission. The different national contingents that show up in the field have never trained together. Their officers do not know one another. The equipment they arrive with varies enormously in quantity and quality, and is typically incompatible. The UN lacks the resources to do serious contingency planning before a mission begins, and the staff to fully backstop militarily demanding missions once they are launched.

It is hard to imagine that countries would ever endow the UN with sufficient military capability to tackle an Afghanistan-like situation. If the Bush administration wants a UN that is better equipped for robust peacekeeping even short of that extreme, it will take time, resources - and a change of heart for the US. For Afghanistan, a solution other than UN peacekeeping must be found. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.