US asks for SAS to be sent to Afghanistan

The US has asked for New Zealand's Special Air Service combat soldiers to be sent to Afghanistan, Foreign Minister Murray McCully confirmed today.

Mr McCully met US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington earlier this month and he said that while she did not specifically ask for the SAS, a formal request had now been received.

If the Government agrees, as it is likely to, the elite troops will be sent on their fourth mission to Afghanistan. They were last there in 2006.

"They've sought specifically special forces, SAS," Mr McCully said on TV One's Q&A programme.

"The response is that we're having a look at what we can do at the moment, we started that process before I was in the US."

Mr McCully said there was a military and a civilian component to the US request, although he did not go into details about civilian assistance.

He said the Government was going to consider its resources, and take into account the rollover of the provincial reconstruction team of about 140 Defence Force personnel that was already operating in Afghanistan and would be there until at least September next year.

Mr McCully said there were resource and capacity issues to address.

"We're looking at those issues alongside the SAS deployment and saying if something else happens somewhere else closer to home in our region, what is our capacity to react," he said.

"Remember Afghanistan is not our biggest deployment, Timor-Leste is, we've got significant numbers of people in the Solomons, we've seen trouble in Tonga, we've seen trouble in other places."

Mr McCully said he was not including Fiji in that scenario.

He would not say specifically when the Government would make a decision about sending the SAS to Afghanistan, but referred to the Government's defence review due to be completed by August.

That coincides with elections in Afghanistan, when the country will be particularly vulnerable to unrest.

"We could crib a few weeks on that (August) if we tried hard," he said.

- NZPA