UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. Security Council on Thursday authorized an international force to help keep the peace in the Afghan capital Kabul, with Britain leading the troops and the United States prepared to rescue them in an emergency.
The 15-member council voted unanimously just two days before a vanguard of some 250 British soldiers will be deployed around Kabul on Saturday. The country's new interim government, with Hamid Karzai as prime minister, is to be sworn in on the same day.
Under a U.N.-brokered accord that Afghan factions signed in Bonn, Germany, on Dec. 5, the United Nations must approve the force, although the troops, expected eventually to total 5,000, are not U.N. peacekeepers.
``The United Kingdom is ready to go,'' British Ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock said after the vote.
``We are now moving visibly and in concrete terms in working with the new authority to provide a future for Afghanistan that has security in the front of it and I hope stability and economic generation to follow,'' he said.
U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte called the vote significant and said ``it was important to send that signal of support for the interim government.''
The initial mandate for the new contingents, called the International Security Assistance Force, is for six months, subject to renewal, for peacekeepers in and around Kabul. To move beyond that would require another resolution.