Top UN officials hope to overcome disagreements over a mandate for an international peacekeeping force for Afghanistan before voting tomorrow on a resolution allowing its deployment in Kabul.
Ambassadors from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - China, the United States, France, Britain and Russia - met yesterday without agreeing on the text of the resolution, and are due to meet again today.
The Security Council is set to approve a resolution to deploy its international force made up of several thousand people as laid out in an historic agreement reached in Bonn, Germany, on December 5 by the opposing Afghan factions.
Diplomats suggest the main difficulty lies in defining the role of the peacekeepers.
They are trying to decide whether the peacekeepers should be confined to protecting government buildings, as requested by the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance which controls Kabul, or protect humanitarian aid convoys traveling around the country.
France and Germany argue the force, likely to include troops from those countries, should be deployed only in the capital, Kabul, and at Bagram airport.
By contrast, the British believe "the mandate could be quite general," according to a British diplomat.
Members of the Security Council were also waiting for a letter from Afghan Foreign Minister Mr Abdullah Abdullah that would accept the force under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter.
That arrangement would allow the peacekeepers to use force if necessary.
The Afghan foreign minister will, therefore, back away from his first letter, sent on Friday, in which he accepted deployment of an international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan, but not under Chapter 7.
According to diplomats, issues such as chain of command and relations between the peacekeeping troops and US forces hunting down Osama bin Laden and members of his al-Qaeda network are not being discussed in New York but rather by appropriate headquarters.
The issue dividing Germany and Britain will not be mentioned in the resolution but rather in a letter the British government will send to UN Secretary General Mr Kofi Annan.
AFP