Dec. 17 ? Britain will contribute up to 1,500 troops to an international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan and is willing to command the unit, Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament today. The announcement signals that a long-stalled effort to deploy an international force is back on track.
If the U.N. Security Council approves a peacekeeping resolution soon, the first British soldiers could be in the country by Saturday, Blair said, when the interim Afghan government is due to take office. Britain is pressing the council to vote by the end of the week.
"There has been a brilliant victory over the Taliban," the prime minister said. "But we know that is only the start of enabling Afghanistan to cease being a failed state and become a responsible partner in the region."
Last week representatives of about a dozen countries that might contribute to the force met in London. The participants included France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Australia, Jordan, Malaysia and Turkey. But many details remain undecided, including the force's size and leadership.
James F. Dobbins, special envoy to Afghanistan, said in Kabul Sunday that the United States would provide logistical and intelligence assistance but no combat soldiers to a peacekeeping force.
If Britain takes the lead role, the overall command role will likely fall to British army Maj. Gen. John McColl, who traveled to Kabul over the weekend to make plans for a possible deployment.
As prime minister of a nation that fought two major wars in Afghanistan and ruled it briefly in the 19th century, Blair has said he feels a responsibility to help Afghans build a stable government for their war-torn nation.
But the formation of this "stabilizing force" has not been a particularly stable process. A month ago, Blair talked about sending 5,000 British troops. But after the first 300 soldiers arrived in the country, the Northern Alliance, the opposition group that captured Kabul, bluntly told London that no more British forces would be welcome.
Even now, some alliance leaders are dragging their feet, saying their own fighters can keep order and that at most 200 peacekeepers will be needed. "Foreign peacekeeping troops will be unacceptable to our people," Sayed Najibullah Hashimi, an aide to Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin Rabbani, said today.
Other leaders accept the idea. "The people of Afghanistan want peace," said Yonus Qanooni, the alliance's interior minister. "It will not be a problem to have a peacekeeping force in Afghanistan."
But the alliance continues to try to limits the force's authority. Abdullah, the foreign minister, insisted in a recent letter to the president of the U.N. Security Council, Moctar Ouane of Mali, that the peacekeeping mission be authorized to use force primarily for self-defense. Britain and other European countries want a much tougher mandate that would allow peacekeepers to use force to fulfill their mission.
U.S. officials, meanwhile, have expressed concern that a peacekeeping force might get in the way of offensive operations against remnants of the Taliban and al Qaeda.
The result of the debate is that the force will be smaller than originally conceived and its main job, at least at first, will be to patrol Kabul and to assure members of the new government that the city is not the domain of the Northern Alliance. Beyond that, there appears to be little for a force to do in the capital. Since the Northern Alliance moved in, the city has been secure, with none of the widespread looting or violence that many feared.
Blair's announcement today appeared to crack the multiparty consensus on Afghanistan in British politics. Ian Duncan Smith, the former soldier who leads the Conservative Party, Blair's chief opposition, told Parliament he has "deep misgivings about British deployment on such a mission as peacekeeping."
The Conservatives warn that British soldiers in Afghanistan could become targets of Taliban fighters or sympathizers wanting revenge. To hone that concern, there was news today that a British soldier on peacekeeping duty in Pristina, the provincial capital of Kosovo, had been killed by sniper fire.
Correspondents Peter Baker and Kevin Sullivan in Kabul and special correspondent Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.