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| 1000 Diggers home by Christmas | | |
Australia: AT least 1000 Australian military personnel will be home from Afghanistan by Christmas, with the remaining combat forces staying on after next year only if Kabul accepts they will be immune from prosecution under local laws.
Defence Minister Stephen Smith and Australian Defence Force chief David Hurley announced yesterday that the big coalition base at Tarin Kowt in Oruzgan province, where most of the 1650-strong Australian force is located, will be handed over to the Afghan National Army by the end of this year.
But Mr Smith said the hundreds of remaining Australian troops would "absolutely not" continue to operate in Afghanistan if they were legally vulnerable. Those ADF members who stayed on were likely to be based in Kabul or in Kandahar, they said.
Mr Smith said a role was still to be determined for Australia's special forces contingent, made up of SAS Regiment soldiers and commandos. It would depend on a status of forces agreement now being negotiated.
The Afghan government has said it wants coalition forces to be subject to local laws. The US and Australia have said they could not allow troops in combat roles to be vulnerable to prosecution.
Mr Smith said a continued role for the special forces contingent after 2014 would depend on negotiations under way between the Afghan government and the international coalition.
"But as the government has said, on the appropriate mandate we are prepared to make a special forces contribution either for training or for counter-terrorism purposes," he said. "We'll be involved in discussions with the governments and institutions that'll be making those decisions, but we need to wait a bit further until we can go firm on that."
Mr Smith said the decision to hand over the base was a deeply significant milestone in Australia's decade-long involvement in Afghanistan.
He said war in Afghanistan was "the easiest thing in the world" to get into and the "hardest thing in the world to get out" of. The base handover would mark the end of Australia's role of training and mentoring the 4th Brigade of the Afghan National Army.
Mentoring of headquarters and other specialist elements of the brigade would continue.
General Hurley said Australian forces would remain "combat ready" to assist the Afghans through the coming year.
He stressed that 2014 would not mark the end of the international mission. He said the NATO-led coalition was committed to funding the 350,000-strong Afghan National Security Forces until at least 2017. A major goal now was to strengthen Afghanistan's instruments of government to help them maintain security and deal with corruption.
It was also announced yesterday that the SAS Regiment and 2 Commando Regiment would receive the first army battle honour awarded since Vietnam, for their roles in the battle in eastern Shah Wali Kot in May and June 2010 -- the same action in which SAS corporal Ben Roberts-Smith was awarded the Victoria Cross. |
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