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The United States has now made a formal request for New Zealand's elite soldiers to return to the front line in Afghanistan.
But Foreign Minister Murray McCully says he will not be rushed into a decision and he fears our soldiers could be needed in conflict closer to home.
The SAS has been deployed three times in the war in Afghanistan and now the government has to decide whether to send them back.
"The reason we would commit to do something in Afghanistan is not to try and get something back from the US or anyone else but to protect New Zealanders because we have as much interest as anyone else in having a safe world," McCully told TVNZ's Q + A programme.
A provincial reconstruction team of a 140 New Zealand personnel is already committed in Afghanistan until September 2010 and that creates pressure on military resources.
McCully says he has not had advice as to whether New Zealand is in a position operationally to send the SAS.
"What I can tell you is that we're looking at those issues alongside the SAS deployment issue and saying if something else happens somewhere else closer to home in our region what is our capacity to react."
Clearly there are concerns about the potential for trouble closer to home.
"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," McCully says.
"I'm not specifically including Fiji in this equation but we do have to look what we can do in our region if called upon to do so."
Others are pointing out the long history of military failure in Afghanistan.
"As the British empire discovered a hundred years ago and the Soviet empire discovered in the 1980s, Afghans are not too keen on foreign troops shooting at fellow Afghans and it tends to build the opposition no matter what colour that opposition is," Keith Locke, Greens foreign affairs spokesman told Q + A.
That will weigh heavily on the government as it decides whether to again risk New Zealand lives on the front line in Afghanistan.
