Mindful of its reputation (and lucrative UN peacekeeping duties), it will be wary of an outright coup.
This week the UN security council is likely to commit to turn the African Union-led force into a UN peacekeeping operation, but it will take months to organise.
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A20 Limits to Afghan Peacekeeping A State Department report on Afghanistan raises questions about expanding an international peacekeeping force beyond Kabul, suggesting it will be mainly up to Afghanistan to secure its outlying areas.
Without accountability the UN will lose legitimacy, peacekeeping operations will not learn from previous failures and the vicious cycle that impunity facilitates will continue.
For now, peacekeeping troops will probably be confined to barracks when not on duty, given the uncertain security situation and a historic ambivalence by Afghans about the presence of foreigners in their midst.
Or else, given a moment when international opinion reaches a critical mass, a larger force, a "peacekeeping mission," will be agreed to, with larger numbers of troops dispatched — as they were in Bosnia in the nineteen-nineties — to somehow stop the killers from getting into the villages where they are going about their butchery.
Though the resolution was toned down after objections from Sudan's government, it will allow the peacekeeping troops to use force to prevent attacks on themselves, to protect civilians and aid workers, and to support putting in place a peace agreement.
It will involve not just "peacekeeping," but peacemaking -- deciding who the bad guys are and then killing them until a white flag appears.
But no firm agreement has yet been reached about what sort of peacekeeping force will be used in and around Kabul, who will lead it, or when it will be put in place.
