U.S., U.N. Puzzle Over Afghan Rule

A Bush administration emissary and skeptical officials of the United Nations began to wrestle Thursday with what may be one of the toughest challenges facing the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan--creating an interim post-Taliban government for a country that has not known peace or stability for more than two decades.

Richard N. Haass, the administration’s Afghanistan coordinator, said the effort to craft an interim government “is very much a work in progress.” He talked to reporters after meetings at the United Nations with Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the world organization’s top Afghan strategist, Lakhdar Brahimi.

As the administration looks toward what it hopes will be the demise of the extremist Islamic Taliban regime, it is eager for the U.N. to take broad responsibility for helping to shape a new governing structure that would end Afghanistan’s role as a haven for terrorists and a source of illicit opium and heroin.

But Brahimi is wary. He and other U.N. officials don’t want to repeat the United Nations’ experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-1990s, when it proved incapable of stopping a brutal ethnic war.

On Wednesday, Brahimi said the U.N. will do what it can but has no desire to take sole responsibility for administering a country that has never been easy to govern and has proved to be the graveyard of foreign occupiers--most notably Britain in the 19th century and the Soviet Union in the 20th century.

“The Afghans are a very proud people,” he said. “They don’t like to be ordered around by foreigners. They don’t like to see foreigners there, especially in military uniforms.”

After initial talks Thursday, Haass sounded moderately upbeat.

“It is too early for people to be presenting plans, though we did discuss various aspects of the evolving situation that would have to be addressed,” he said. “This was and is a consultation in every sense of the word.”

Other U.S. officials sought to paper over the disagreement on the U.N.’s prospective role in Afghanistan.

A State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Brahimi “was cataloging the difficulties in this sort of thing. That is a realistic appreciation of what is in store. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

Robert L. Oakley, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, said: “This is a tough one. It’s going to take a lot of time. I don’t see too many countries volunteering for this [peacekeeping] mission.”

Brahimi said the U.N. is eager to take part in international efforts to provide enough food to carry chronically malnourished Afghans through the bitter winter that begins soon. Already, planning is starting at U.N. headquarters, with the focus on helping to restore roads, bridges and electricity once the crisis abates.

But the food situation is critical. The U.N.’s World Food Program says it is delivering less than half the food needed to sustain people who have fled their homes, either for camps within Afghanistan or across the border. The number of people at risk of starvation has reportedly increased from 3.8 million before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to about 6 million now.

Even if the humanitarian crisis can be solved, the problem of establishing a stable and broad-based government is daunting. The United States says its objective is to cobble together a coalition government that will represent all of the country’s tribes and factions. But no one really knows how to do that.

The United States also must balance its desire for an all-inclusive government with its de facto battlefield alliance with the Northern Alliance rebel force, the remnant of the government that the Taliban displaced in the mid-1990s.

Regional experts say the Northern Alliance, a coalition of minority ethnic groups, will be unable to govern the country on its own.

Times Washington Bureau chief Doyle McManus and Times staff writer John L. Goldman in New York contributed to this report.