Sat, Oct 13, 2001 page5

• Britain asks US to accept role in nation-building

  UN ROLE Senior British officials are thinking about more than simply getting bin Laden and are looking for ways to ensure stability once the Taliban is gone

  • NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  Britain, Washington's most active ally in the struggle against terrorism, is pushing the Bush administration to ease its often-stated resistance to "nation-building" and to support a post-Taliban government in Afghanistan brokered by the UN, senior British officials say.

  At the same time, these officials say, Britain is urging the administration to avoid expanding the war to Iraq.

  In effect, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has been more visible and vocal than even US President George W. Bush in trying to explain the goals of the attacks on Afghanistan and the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, is trying to prod the Bush administration toward accepting an idea it has repeatedly rejected: the responsibility of nation building.

  The intention is to "develop a clear strategy for post-Taliban stability," a senior official said. The US "is coming to see the need for a UN role, but it's a hard starting point," he said. "But better the UN than the US doing it."

  In the name of solidifying the international coalition against terrorism and trying to ensure that fragile states like Pakistan and even Saudi Arabia do not implode, Blair is promising significant and prolonged aid to Afghanistan and other failing states -- a kind of nation building that Republicans generally despise, at least when Democrats do it.

  One of Bush's presidential campaign themes was a criticism of the Clinton administration for trying to fix broken societies at too high a price, especially in places where American national interests were not clearly at stake.

  To limit the Western presence in Afghanistan -- and dilute the charge that the West seeks to impose a new government there -- Blair and his foreign secretary, Jack Straw, are working with Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN's special envoy to Afghanistan. Brahimi, a respected Algerian mediator who held the same job from 1997 to 1999, was reappointed on Oct. 3 by Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

  The idea, as British officials explain it, is for Brahimi to construct plans for a broad-based government of the varying tribes, including new dissidents formerly allied with the Taliban, that can satisfy Pakistan as well as India, Iran, Russia and China. The exiled king of Afghanistan, the 86-year-old Zahir Shah, deposed in 1973, would bless the process and call for a loya jirga, the traditional meeting of tribal leaders that can legitimize a new ruler.

  Britain and the US agree that the main Taliban opposition force, the Northern Alliance, cannot be allowed by default to fill a post-Taliban vacuum created by Western military action.

  The West would then support the new government with a long-term program of food and other aid, advice and debt relief, tied to goals like a reduction in opium production, to try to prevent Afghanistan from falling into chaos again.

  Brahimi was in London on Tuesday, meeting Blair, Straw and Blair's top foreign-policy aides.

  In a British strategy document, portions of which were released to calm Arab opinion, Blair also emphasizes the need for reconstructing Afghanistan, something senior American officials say worries them less just now than tracking down bin Laden and those who are harboring him.

  "We're interested in nation building, or you go straight back to chaos," another senior British official said. The official noted Blair's acknowledgment, in a speech to his Labor Party conference last week, of the error of abandoning Afghanistan in 1991, once the Soviet army was driven out.

  "We will not walk away, as the outside world has done so many times before," Blair said, in what he called a commitment to the Afghan people.

  The British strategy paper, called "Defeating International Terrorism: Campaign Objectives," foresees a 5-to-10 year program of reconstruction in Afghanistan costing as much as US$40 billion.

  "Military action can only be part of a strategy," a British official said, citing London's mixed experience with terrorism in Northern Ireland.

  "You've got to get to the root causes," which are political, another reason why Blair is pressing for a serious recommitment by the West to a peace process in the Middle East. "The Bush people made a big mistake in stepping back from the Middle East" at the start of the administration, the official said. "We need it to keep this coalition together."

  Blair is also trying to influence the ongoing debate in Washington about the post-Afghanistan phase of this war by insisting that military action only be taken against those organizations and states proved to be responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on Washington and New York.

  British officials emphasize that there is no evidence to link Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks, although they acknowledge that any such evidence would put Blair in an awkward position. "I know it's a common right-wing view in Washington that Iraq must be involved," a senior British official said. "But it's a big jump in logic, and to go bomb Iraq for this attack would be daft. We need to deal with the job in hand first, Osama bin Laden and his organization, Afghanistan and its future."

  Of course, the Americans and British have been bombing Iraq regularly for years to try to enforce a no-fly zone dating from the Gulf War, and to keep Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein "in his box," as the Americans put it.
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