The Battle Over Peacekeeping

Remember "mission creep"? the Pentagon does. In 1993 what started as a humanitarian operation to feed starving Somalis turned into an exercise in "nation building" and ended with the death of 18 American soldiers on the streets of Mogadishu. Nobody in the U.S. military wants to repeat the experience.

Trouble is, given the current conditions in Afghanistan, mission creep may be hard to avoid. U.S. special forces, allied with "friendly" Afghan tribes and militias, are roaming the country, looking for remnants of the Taliban and senior members of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's terror network. Defense Department officials acknowledge that, given the rivalries among Afghan factions and warlords, the U.S. could easily be perceived as favoring one side or another. That would make targets of American forces. To prevent that from happening, Washington has begun a debate over exactly how peace can be established and maintained in Afghanistan--and what the long-term role of international peacekeepers and the U.S. in that exercise may be.

"We are not involving ourselves in internecine politics," insists Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, "including politics backed by guns." So why did U.S. aircraft recently conduct two bombing missions outside the eastern city of Khost, aimed at militias opposed to Afghanistan's interim leader Hamid Karzai? In an interview, General Tommy Franks, commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, told TIME that the bombings were a response to attacks on American forces. As Franks put it, there were some "bad guys" in the region. When friendly Afghan forces conducted a sweep, they were attacked. "Then our people went with them," said Franks, "and our people were shot at." Hence the air strikes.

There may be more to it than that. A Western diplomat in Kabul says intelligence reports indicate that Iranian agents have been seen around Khost--far to the east of where they were thought to have been most active--buying off tribal commanders in a deliberate effort to undermine Karzai. That's why the Americans thought there were "bad guys" in the region. But nobody supposes that Karzai can demand the application of American force against his rivals whenever he feels like it. "We keep telling [the government], 'Don't cry wolf,'" says a European official in Kabul. "They can't just click their fingers and call down U.S. firepower." Franks underlines the point. "We support the interim government in Afghanistan," he told TIME, "but we are not picking sides between groups on the ground."

Feith says the main focus of American military activity is "finishing the job against al-Qaeda and the Taliban," the initial goals of the American war effort in Afghanistan. Indeed, there is a job to finish: bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders remain unaccounted for. But even if every member of al-Qaeda had been shipped to Guantanamo Bay and every former Taliban had gone back to his farm, the American job would not be done. Feith acknowledges that the U.S. has an interest in making Afghanistan sufficiently stable so that it is less likely to become a base for terrorist operations. "We want the current Afghan political experiment to succeed," he says. The question is, How can that objective be attained without the very nation building that Washington doesn't want to do?