Abdullah told journalists during a joint news conference with the U.S. special envoy to the anti-Taliban forces, James Dobbins, in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent that less than 100 British soldiers were at the Bagram airbase North of Kabul "to provide security for humanitarian aid."
He also said that a United Nations sponsored meeting to discuss the formation of a broad-based Afghan government would likely take place within a week.
Dobbins arrived in Uzbekistan this weekend from Pakistan where he conducted talks with representatives of other anti-Taliban groups.
Abdullah flew to Tashkent to meet him from the Afghan capital Kabul, where -- despite concern from the international community -- the Northern Alliance appears to be establishing a government. The alliance -- a fractious coalition of ethnic groups and local warlords -- represents the government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who returned to Kabul Saturday.
The alliance has very little support among Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns, who dominate the South of the country. But in the North, the alliance has occupied almost all but one of the towns once controlled by the Taliban.
Rabbani's tenure in power during the early 1990's was widely considered a disaster -- a civil war killed tens of thousands of Afghans, reduced many cities to rubble and paved the way for rule of the Taliban militia.
Over the past few days, leaders of the Northern Alliance have voiced disquiet at the deployment of foreign troops in the areas of Afghanistan they control.
"If we're talking about thousands of fighting forces from outside Afghanistan, this is a major issue that has to be discussed," Abdullah said Saturday in Kabul.
However, Sunday he made it clear that the Alliance had agreed the deployment at Bagram with the British government.
"We are in the picture and in full agreement," he said.
Since Thursday, a force of about 100 British troops -- accompanied, according to the Washington Post, by 60 U.S. special operations forces in civilian clothes -- have been preparing the airbase to receive humanitarian and diplomatic flights, like the one which brought U.N. negotiator Fransesc Vendrell and his team to Kabul on Saturday.
Abdullah also said a U.N.-sponsored meeting to discuss the creation of a broad-based Afghan government could happen within a week.
"The victories and liberation of areas by our armed forces shouldn't affect our commitment to the formation of a fully representative, multi-ethnic broad-based government, but it will rather encourage us to speed up our efforts with our national, regional and international partners in order to achieve that," Abdullah said.
He added that the venue for the meeting still had to be decided, but that Germany, Geneva in Switzerland and Vienna in Austria would be acceptable to the alliance and that a decision should be made within the next two or three days.
According to Abdullah, there are several Pashtun leaders who could play a role in pacification.
Earlier this week Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, one of the leaders of the Northern Alliance, who controls the region around and in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif told the Uzbek television first channel in the course of a telephone interview that the future Afghan government must voice interests of all ethnic groups residing in Afghanistan and establish "fundamentals of democracy."
Copyright 2001 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.