Australia's Afghan force beefed up

CANBERRA - Australia has confirmed it will send 200 more troops to Afghanistan to work with Dutch soldiers in the troubled southern Oruzgan province.

The new deployment will be similar to New Zealand's provincial reconstruction team and will not be engaged in combat missions of the kind being undertaken by special forces units.

But it will be working in a region that is the base of Taleban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and which has seen growing violence since the middle of last year. The United States has been operating there with Marines and a reconstruction team, but no aid agencies have sent teams permanently into the region.

The move follows the decision by the Dutch Parliament this month to commit about 1400 soldiers to reconstruction efforts in the province as part of an expansion of the Nato-led Security Assistance Force.

Canberra already has a 200-member special forces task group of SAS troopers and commandoes there and due to return to Australia in September. This month a further 110 soldiers and two Chinook helicopters were sent to assist the task force. The helicopters may remain until November to help the reconstruction team settle in.

Observers have worried that the rising level of commitment to Afghanistan, as well as the more than 400 troops based in southern Iraq, is stretching Australia's defence force to its limits.