Beyond A Call for United Nations "Peacekeeping" in Afghanistan from an article for the Los Angeles Times by Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks One of the most famous photographs in history: "the haunted eyes and a tattered garment tell the plight of a 12 years-old girl who fled her native Afghanistan for a refugee camp in Pakistan in 1983". Photo by Steve McCurry, courtsey of National Geographic Los Angeles Times Sunday, November 25, 2001, page one WITH THE RAPID collapse of Taliban forces throughout most of Afghanistan, many commentators have uncorked the champagne. But celebrations are premature. Osama bin Laden's terrorist network apparently remains intact. What's more, the continued chaos in Afghanistan poses an ongoing threat to regional stability, to the long-term success of the U.S. "war against terrorism," and to the rights and lives of ordinary Afghans - especially women. Ensuring that Afghanistan's future is less blood-drenched than its past will certainly require a long-term commitment of money and talent, as the United States works with the United Nations to help rebuild the nation's devastated civic infrastructure. But it may also require us to use force - possibly against our erstwhile Northern Alliance allies - to protect human rights and foster democracy in a post-Taliban Afghanistan. So far, the United States has aided anti-Taliban forces on the apparent principle that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. But the viciousness of Northern Alliance troops during the last decade of Afghan civil war was legendary, so much so that many Afghans - and the U.S. State Department - initially greeted the Taliban's 1996 takeover with relief. What are the chances, post-Taliban, of lasting gains for Afghan women and civilians? Slim, if we leave it to the Northern Alliance. Some snapshots from the Alliance's recent past: In 1995, Alliance troops "went on a rampage, systematically looting whole streets and raping women" in parts of Kabul, according to a 1996 State Department report. Witnesses reported that hundreds of women committed suicide to avoid the mass rapes, many by throwing themselves out of high windows. When Northern Alliance forces took Mazar-e- Sharif in 1997, they massacred several thousand Taliban prisoners of war. Some were lined up and shot; others were blown up by grenades or drowned in wells. Throughout the war, the Alliance indiscriminately bombed civilian populations and used children as soldiers and minesweepers. Recent reports of lootings and executions by Alliance troops in Mazar-e-Sharif suggest that little has changed. We should accelerate planning for an interim UN-sponsored government to take charge until Afghan society is capable of sustaining a genuine rights-respecting democracy in which women are full participants. If this means getting tough with our Northern Alliance proxy soldiers, we shouldn't shrink from doing so. The lesson from past interventions is crystal clear: Protecting human rights and ensuring political stability can't be accomplished by hand-wringing alone. Sometimes it takes muscle - muscle that goes beyond simply dropping bombs from on high. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, UN peacekeepers stood by while forces backed by former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic slaughtered thousands of civilians at Srebrenica. Consequently, Milosevic came back to haunt us, expensively, a few years later. In Rwanda, UN soldiers retreated while nearly a million civilians were hacked to death. Since then, Rwanda's conflict has spilled over to destabilize a wide swath of Central Africa. In Kosovo, I watched a UN official weep as he recounted how heavily armed NATO peacekeepers passively watched as a Serbian mob beat an Albanian women. In Sierra Leone, I saw despairing refugees fleeing rebel atrocities, at a time when the world showed more concern for the few hundred UN peacekeepers taken prisoner by the rebels than for the many thousands of civilians those very soldiers had been sent to protect. Sierra Leone remains unstable today - and, irony of ironies, recent evidence suggests that Sierra Leone's rebels have profited mightily by selling illegally mined diamonds to the al-Qaida terrorist network. We need to learn from past mistakes to break the cycle of atrocity and terror in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance is unlikely to include women or other ethnic groups in a post-Taliban government unless compelled to do so. Therefore, UN troops sent to provide security in Afghanistan must be given a robust mandate to protect human rights and safeguard fledgling democratic institutions. Peacekeepers will need rules of engagement that allow them to use force when necessary to accomplish these goals. Some will claim that insisting on human rights, women's rights and democracy in a foreign land is "neo-colonialist." But there is nothing "un-Islamic" about basic human rights. Rina Amiri, an Afghan activist now at Harvard's Women and Public Policy Program, observes that "thirty years ago Afghan women enjoyed many more political rights than they have today." Helping to restore to Afghan women the rights that years of war and extremist Islamic oppression took away from them is not an imposition of values, but a restoration of pre-war Afghan values. In the end, concern about "imposing" our principles on post-Taliban Afghanistan is not only self-defeating but strikingly disingenuous. We didn't hesitate to impose our American bombs on the Afghan population. We shouldn't now hesitate to impose our commitment to human rights and democracy. *** *** Author Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks is a former senior policy adviser at the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor; She is currently an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.