Kabul, Afghanistan — Many Afghans want international peacekeepers to expand their mission to areas outside the capital where warlords reign and al-Qaida and Taliban renegades are being hunted by U.S.-led forces, the country's interim leader said Friday.
Any move to extend the mandate of the international force is likely to draw strong opposition, not only from regional warlords but from members of Prime Minister Hamid Karzai's government.
The British-led peacekeeping force, which eventually will total about 5,000 troops, is confined to Kabul under a U.N.-brokered agreement last month that also established a temporary government following the collapse of the Taliban. Karzai's government took office Dec. 22 to run the country for six months.
"A lot of Afghans who came to see us in the past month asked us for the presence of the international security force in other parts of Afghanistan," Karzai said during a news conference with visiting U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
Key figures in the government, especially the ethnic Tajiks who fought against the Taliban in the northern alliance, want to limit the role of the peacekeeping force to protecting government facilities in Kabul. Karzai is from the same ethnic Pashtun community as most of the Taliban leadership, although he opposed the Islamic militia.
During the news conference, Annan, who paid a one-day visit to Kabul before going to Iran, avoided answering whether the United Nations would support a broader mandate, which would require approval of the U.N. Security Council.
Instead, Annan said he and Karzai had discussed the "urgent formation" of an Afghan police force and army.
On Thursday, the United Nation's outgoing deputy special envoy to Afghanistan, Francesc Vendrell, warned that without a larger and more widely deployed peacekeeping force, Afghanistan could slide back into factional fighting. Such fighting destroyed the country in the past decade and led to the Taliban's rise.
"There is a feeling of insecurity in many parts of Afghanistan," Vendrell said. "The situation is fragile."
Although the military campaign appears to be winding down, the United States and its allies are still fighting pockets of Taliban and al-Qaida resistance in the south and east of the country.
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