A new government is coming to Afghanistan tomorrow, and hopes are high in this devastated country that peace and security will reign for the first time in 20 years.
Preparations were in high gear yesterday as the interim government's 30 ministers began arriving in Kabul from all parts of the country and neighbouring Pakistan.
Two floors of the city's Intercontinental Hotel have been cleared for members of the government, who are due to be sworn in tomorrow at a two-hour event at the Interior Ministry auditorium.
Mr Hamid Karzai is due to be sworn in as president in an event expected to be attended by the UN Special Representative, Mr Lakhdar Brahimi, the US envoy, Mr James Dobbins and foreign ministers from neighbouring Iran and Pakistan.
Two of Mr Karzai's main political rivals - the outgoing president, Mr Burhanuddin Rabbani, and a mujahedeen faction leader, Mr Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf - are also expected to speak during a ceremony the international community hopes will usher in a period of relative peace after more than two decades of civil war.
Yet most details of the weekend's events are being kept secret for security reasons, according to a UN spokeswoman, Ms Stephanie Bunker. Neither the UN nor the Northern Alliance, which currently controls Kabul, would release information about the ceremony.
Dr Sima Samar, incoming vice-chair of the government and minister for women's affairs, arrived late yesterday. She said she had not even been informed about the proceedings and she looked forward to being briefed soon on the UN's plans for various ministries. "I am the only minister without even a destroyed building of my own," she quipped.
Dr Abdullah Abdullah, the incoming Foreign Minister, spent most of the day meeting US representative Mr James Dobbins and other diplomats.
An explosion ripped through a market in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif yesterday, wounding 100 people, six of them seriously, according to hospital officials.
One of the wounded said he saw a 32-piece fragmentation grenade roll into the moneychangers' section of the city's central market before the explosion.
Meanwhile, the UN Security Council yesterday approved a resolution authorising a British-led multinational force to protect the interim administration.
The resolution authorises a British-led international force for Kabul expected to be only a small fraction of the size of the peacekeeping contingents sent to the Balkans in the 1990s. A British defence official said it would eventually total between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers.
The new Afghan Defence Minister, Mr Mohammad Fahim, said troops would number around 1,000, with other personnel providing logistical support.
Germany has expressed opposition to the strong role to be played by the US military in the command of the force.
At a newly-built detention centre at the airport in the Taliban's former power base of Kandahar, FBI agents have been interrogating Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters, believing they might help capture bin Laden or divulge plans for further attacks on the US.
The prisoners, some of them injured, are being held under heavy guard in a compound with space for 120 prisoners and surrounded by mud walls and rolls of barbed wire.
Operations continued against bin Laden's al-Qaeda network as Pakistani forces fought gun battles with Arab fighters who fled across the border and US-backed Afghan militiamen searched their cave bunkers.
US warplanes flew reconnaissance missions over al-Qaeda's former stronghold in Tora Bora, and intelligence officials interrogated captured fighters, but there was still no news of bin Laden.
"The process of looking though those caves is not finished," said Mr Kenton Keith, a spokesman for the US-led coalition, adding that Washington would seek bin Laden's extradition if he was found in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere.
Reuters reports:
British marines arrived in Kabul to spearhead a multinational security force, as Afghan authorities ordered gunmen off the capital's streets, two days before the installation of an interim government.
The 53 Royal Marine commandos, an advance party of the several thousand strong force, were to provide security for dignitaries flying into the country for the inauguration of the new government tomorrow.
"It is the initial stage of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force). We are here to start providing security and assistance," said the company commander, Major Matt Jones said.
Fighters brandishing rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers and other weaponry have flooded the streets since the Taliban regime fled the capital on the night of November 12th, often threatening passers-by.
Most of bin Laden's fighters are thought to have fled towards the border in recent days, following two weeks of intense US air raids and ground attacks by allied local militia that died down Sunday.
Afghan commanders said late on Wednesday that the bodies of "perhaps several hundred" al-Qaeda fanatics were strewn across the mountain. Ammunition, guns, surface-to-air missiles and other weapons were also found in caves.