France, UK to push for Kabul safe zone

France and Britain will submit a resolution to an emergency United Nations meeting due today proposing a safe zone in Kabul to try and protect people trying to leave Afghanistan, French President Emmanuel Macron said yesterday.

"Our resolution proposal aims to define a safe zone in Kabul, under UN control, which would allow humanitarian operations to continue," Macron told French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD) in an interview.

"What we are trying to do is to be able to organise targeted humanitarian operations for evacuations that will not take place through the military airport in Kabul," he said.

"It is about protecting these threatened Afghans and getting them out of the country in the coming days or weeks. We will see if this can be done through the capital's civilian airport or through neighbouring countries".

He said such a deal would be a prerequisite for constructing a future western relationship with the Taliban.

Journal du Dimanche cited Macron as saying the UK backed the resolution, although London has not spoken publicly on any such efforts. A Whitehall source played down the French president's comments, saying the plans outlined in the interview were "premature".

"We are not there yet," the source said.

It is not yet clear if Russia or China will accept the resolution, or see it as an incursion into Afghan sovereignty.

Turkey had been negotiating with the Taliban and the US to take military responsibility for the airport, but abandoned the plan after the Taliban said they would not accept Turkish troops remaining on its soil.

Macron made no attempt to hide that the evacuation operation was incomplete. "We still have on our lists several thousand Afghans who we want to protect, who are at risk because of their commitments - magistrates, artists, intellectuals - but also many other people who have been reported by relatives and who we are told are at risk," he said.

The French president made a succession of pointed remarks towards the US, pointing out that Joe Biden had yet to accept many refugees from Afghanistan on to American soil but was instead sending them to processing centres in countries as far afield as Uganda and Albania.

France, he said, "had fought for the last few years to avoid too brutal a disengagement of the Americans or other allies in the region", adding that the withdrawal from Afghanistan could have a negative impact on Iraq and Syria.

"The risk now, as we have seen in Afghanistan, is that the impression is given that the west has conditional allies that they are abandoning when their agenda changes. This is not our case. France does not abandon those who fought alongside it".

He added that the US had shifted its "strategic agenda" to the Asia-Pacific region because American middle-class voters do "not understand why [Washington] sends soldiers for years to die at the end of the world".

He concluded: "We must therefore play our part more in the face of the destabilisation of our neighbourhood."

On a visit to Mosul in Iraq, Macron later confirmed the safe zone comments and said he was hopeful the resolution would be welcomed favourably.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is convening a meeting on Afghanistan with the UN envoys for Britain, France, the United States, China and Russia - the Security Council's permanent, veto-wielding members.