Australian SAS heading back to war in Afghanistan

CANBERRA - Prime Minister John Howard has ordered Australia's special forces back into Afghanistan to help counter rising Taleban violence and fears that al Qaeda is regrouping for international terror attacks.

A task force of 150 SAS troopers, commandos and support units will leave in September to work under the operational command of American forces whose own soldiers have suffered heavily in recent engagements.

The task force will spend 12 months in Afghanistan, returning to Australia ahead of the intense security screen that will be needed for the 2007 Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum in Sydney.

The operation is expected to cost up to A$100 million ($110 million).

Canberra is also considering deploying a provincial reconstruction team next year, which would bring the structure of its new commitment in line with New Zealand's Afghan force of SAS and engineers.

The Government had previously come under heavy pressure to send new forces to Afghanistan from the Labor Opposition, which compared New Zealand's commitment with the single Australian officer working in Kabul.

Howard said yesterday the decision to send the new task force had followed requests from the United States, Britain and Afghanistan's interim Administration, now 10 weeks away from parliamentary elections.

The decision also followed warnings from Attorney-General Philip Ruddock that instability in Afghanistan could enable a resurgence of the terrorist activity that led to more than 10,000 recruits being trained in the remote mountains before the September 11, 2001, terror attacks.

But Howard quashed speculation that Australia was also about to boost its presence in Iraq at the request of Britain, saying that the present commitment - including 450 troops and armour working with the British in the south of the country - was appropriate.

He said the original SAS deployment to Afghanistan in 2001 as part of the US-led multinational war on terror bases had ended the next year on military advice, but new efforts were needed to ensure stability in the country.

"It is fair to say that the progress that's been made and the establishment of a legitimate government in Afghanistan has come under increasingly tough pressure from the Taleban in particular and some elements of al Qaeda," he said.

"We have received at a military level requests from both the US and others, and the Government of Afghanistan, and we have therefore decided, in order to support the efforts of others to support in turn the Government of Afghanistan, to dispatch a special forces task group ...

"We think it is important that the progress made in Afghanistan is preserved and consolidated and that the resurgence of violence and the resurgence of the attempts by the Taleban to undermine the government of that country are not successful."

The ability of the sorely-stretched Australian Defence Force to commit new troops to Afghanistan has been enhanced by the withdrawal of other forces from East Timor and the Solomons, and a year-long respite for the SAS after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

But the task force will be committed to highly dangerous operations of the kind that have led to 54 US soldiers being killed in the first six months of the year, already surpassing the 52 deaths in 2004.

One Australian SAS trooper was killed and another seriously injured during the first Afghan deployment that focused heavily on small combat patrols, surveillance, and directing air strikes against Taleban targets.

Seven troopers won gallantry awards.

Similar missions targeting terror groups will be carried out by the new task force, raising the prospect of casualties.