UNITED NATIONS (Islamweb & News Agencies) - Britain has accepted the task of leading and organizing a multinational force for Afghanistan, which the U.N. Security Council is expected to approve by Friday, U.S. diplomats said on Monday.
But U.N. officials are worried that the NATO nations, who are to form the core of the force, may not deploy troops by Dec. 22, when a new interim government is to take office in Kabul.
Formation of the force has been delayed because no country quickly offered to take the lead, with both Britain and Germany hesitating at first. But Britain has now assumed the leading role, at least for a few months, and troop contributors are expected to meet in London next week to decide the shape of the new force, diplomats said.
The task was also slowed by the reluctance of the U.S. military to have a parallel operation in Afghanistan during its war against terrorism.
``It would be desirable if this thing was starting to move at the time the government set up on December 22,'' Secretary of State Colin Powell said over the weekend in Uzbekistan. ``I just don't know if it'll go that fast.''
The council, is to mandate but not organize the force. That will be Britain's task. Other countries expected to join are NATO members Turkey, France, Canada and Italy.
Some Jordanian troops are already on the ground, and the French are guarding the airport at Mazar-i-Sharif. Bangladesh and Indonesia have expressed an interest in the force, providing funds are raised to bring their troops to Afghanistan.
Lakhdar Brahimi, the chief U.N. envoy for Afghanistan, weeks ago excluded any all-Muslim force, as some U.S. officials had suggested, saying Muslims would be regarded as foreigners as much as any other troops.
A U.N. peacekeeping force was also ruled out, with officials saying it would take too long to organize and would include too many troops that had never worked with each other.
At this point, the United States has no intention of joining the new force, although Europeans hope it will do so in the future. The U.S. Central Command, led by Gen. Tommy Franks, has had misgivings about another force on the ground during its military campaign against the Taliban and the al Qaeda network headed by Osama bin Laden.
But the U.S. military is said to be on board now for Afghanistan to see two foreign forces: the security force, intended to reinforce peace, and the American and British troops, still prosecuting war.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has warned that the two militaries should not overlap. ``There must be a clear separation between the current deployment against the Taliban and U.N. troops to support the accord,'' he said.
What exactly the new force will do is still under discussion. In Kabul, Northern Alliance troops have taken over the capital. One purpose of the multinational troops would be to make sure no one military faction dominates in Kabul, but how this would be achieved is uncertain.
With the onset of winter, relief groups have also appealed for the force to help them distribute aid and protect goods from ``banditry and general lawlessness within substantial parts of Afghanistan,'' as they said in a letter to top U.S. officials and U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte at the United Nations.
But it is not certain if the force would ride shotgun on relief convoys as a U.N. operation did in Bosnia and the United States did in Somalia.
Italy agreed to foot the 7.5 million cost of enlarging the U.N. logistics base and warehouse at Brindisi, a start-up center for peacekeeping supplies as well as for the storage of goods for such U.N. relief agencies as the Rome-based World Food Program.