A British army officer may become the United Nations’s top administrator in Afghanistan, in a highly unusual move which reflects international concern at mounting threats to security in the war-torn country.
”I am being considered and I have been interviewed in New York,” Major-General John McColl said last night. ”The [UN] secretary general is expected to announce shortly who has got the job.
”Appointing an army officer as a UN special representative would be unusual. It’s not the norm. I would of course function as a civilian.”
Lakhdar Brahimi, currently the UN secretary general’s special representative in Afghanistan, is to leave Kabul this week. He stressed the lack of security in closing remarks to the constitutional convention at the weekend, saying that the absence of the rule of law put ”fear into the heart of practically every Afghan”.
General McColl won the respect of Afghans and western governments when Britain was in charge of the international peacekeeping force in Kabul during the first six months after the defeat of the Taliban. He commanded the troops who acted as a substitute police force in the lawless capital and a powerful curb on the warlords who wanted to fill the security vacuum.
The warlords and their fundamentalist allies still wield enormous influence, as they showed during the constitutional convention which ended on Sunday after three weeks of wrangling. In the southern and eastern parts of the country a full-scale war is resuming as insurgent Taliban forces increasingly target UN officials, aid workers, and Afghans who work with the international community.
General McColl would take over at a time when UN officials are losing hope that the presidential election can be held this year, as planned.
The Bush administration has touted the election, in which Hamid Karzai, the pro-western current president, is sure to run, as proof that the transition to democracy after the 2001 war is a success. But mounting attacks mean that the election may have to be postponed.
At present General McColl is the commandant of Britain’s Joint Services Command and Staff College. He previously worked for the UN as commander of international forces in Vitez, central Bosnia, in 1994.
Although General McColl said he did not know how many other people had been interviewed for the post, he has the backing of the British government, which means the US will have given its approval to his candidacy.
Afghanistan has the anomaly of two sets of foreign troops, 5 000 in the international security assistance force (Isaf) based in Kabul and 11 000, mainly American, warring troops who are trying to combat the resurgent Taliban and hunt for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders. Diplomats have frequently criticised the lack of coordination between the two groups.
General McColl’s appointment would offer a chance to improve the links.
Unlike its limited role in restoring sovereignty to a democratically elected government in Iraq, the UN was in full charge of the transition to civilian rule in Afghanistan. Brahimi played a big part in brokering the first interim government at the Bonn conference in 2001. He has pressed constantly for Isaf to expand beyond Kabul, and recently said Afghanistan could be ”lost” unless foreign governments made stronger efforts to enforce security.
The security council agreed to expand Isaf last autumn, but no government has offered large amounts of troops to implement the promise.
Despite success in getting a new constitution, pessimism surrounds the next step in trying to promote stability. Voter registration got off to a poor start in eight cities last month, with barely 250 000 out of an estimated adult population of 10-million receiving their laminated polling cards. In the south, only a 10th of the expected number registered, mainly because security fears limited the number of centres.
An aid worker for a Christian emergency relief organisation was kidnapped in Zabul province, police said yesterday. It was the latest in a string of attacks on the highway from Kabul to Kandahar, which have led most aid agencies as well as the UN to pull their foreign staff out of an area covering a third of Afghanistan. – Guardian Unlimited Â