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UN Rejects US Postwar Plan - Empire? - Global Policy Forum UN Rejects US Postwar Plan
By James Rupert
News Day
October 18, 2001
With U.S. jets bombing day and night to force a military and political collapse of the Taliban, the Bush administration pressed urgently yesterday for the United Nations to be ready to create some form of government for Afghanistan.
But UN officials voiced annoyance, saying Washington is trying to make them produce a nearly instant settlement to the decades-old war over who should rule and how. They said the United States could drive the UN into an ill-prepared peacekeeping and "nation-building" exercise.
"We may see a political vacuum immediately" in Afghanistan, said Secretary of State Colin Powell. Flying to Shanghai for an Asian-Pacific summit conference, he told reporters of the U.S. vision for a way to govern Afghanistan after a Taliban collapse.
"I think what we're going to need ... is some sort of broad-based assemblage of individuals, leaders, representing all aspects of Afghan society," perhaps with former King Muhammad Zahir Shah "as a rallying point," Powell said. "I think there probably will be a role for peacekeepers of some kind," he said, according to news agencies.
With Afghanistan lacking any real government or functioning administration, U.S. officials have compared it to Cambodia, where the UN spent 26 months building a government after a 1991 peace settlement. Administration officials are suggesting a similar UN role in Afghanistan, with UN troops perhaps led by Turkey.
But among the UN agencies that would implement such programs, the sudden urgency has generated annoyance and frustration. The United Nations has struggled for years to forge a political settlement in Afghanistan, "but we got little attention or support from the United States or other governments," said a UN source who has worked on the Afghan problem.
Now, as the United States chases the Islamic militants it blames for the Sept. 11 attacks, "they started bombing and realized they cannot get out without a political solution," another staffer said. "So suddenly they have rediscovered the United Nations."
On Oct. 3, Secretary General Kofi Annan re-appointed Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi as special representative for Afghanistan, a post he quit three years ago because of Taliban intransigence and lukewarm support from the international community.
Brahimi has begun hearing from U.S. officials what they want the UN to do, and is to meet Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage tomorrow for detailed talks. But Brahimi sounded a cautious warning yesterday.
"We cannot produce a solution out of a hat," he told reporters. "The UN is not seeking a [role in creating] a transitional administration or peacekeeping or anything like that," he said.
On Tuesday, Brahimi told the Security Council that with winter approaching the UN's top priority should be delivering food and supplies to hundreds of thousands of Afghans displaced by war, diplomats said. On a political settlement, "we are going to do what we can," said another UN official. "But we have been working on this for years," during which time the conflict has grown more bitter and polarized. "With international support making peace is possible," but probably not on a schedule convenient to the U.S. military, he said.
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