Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the latest loss increased the determination of the soldiers serving in Afghanistan to get the job done.

"There will be Australians today who are asking themselves in the face of this loss why as a country do we continue to pursue our mission there." she told reporters in Darwin, ahead of the funeral of one of three Australian soldiers killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan last month.

"We pursue that mission because Afghanistan is a safe haven for terrorists.

"I believe Australia, while mourning these losses, will understand our continuing determination."

Ms Gillard said the government had always been frank with the Australian people about the difficulty of the task in Afghanistan "but we are proceeding through it".

As the war in Afghanistan marches on, & will soon escalate with the planned Kandahar offensive, & another Anzac Day passes, spare a thought for the 17 Australian soldiers killed - & for their friends & families who have been left with the agonising emptiness of the loss of their loved one.

Spare a thought also for more than 143 defence personnel counted by the Australian Defence Force as having sustained injuries categorised as amputations, fractures, gunshot wounds, hearing loss, lacerations/contusions, concussion/traumatic brain wounds, penetrating fragments & multiple severe wounds. And for our combat veterans returning from Afghanistan with long-term mental health disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

And spare a thought for the tens of thousands of men, women & children of Afghanistan who have been killed by the US military or as a consequence of the invasion of their country.

Is the suffering worth it? Presumably everyone has an opinion but, even though 70% of orstraylens are opposed to our continuing presence in Afghanistan, the fact that the country's political elites are locked together at the hip ensures that there is no public debate. 

In fact, our craven subservience to all things American has ensured that there hasn't even been any real parliamentary debate about the war in Afghanistan & our involvement in it since we joined the initial invasion in 2001.

Over the nine years since the horror of 9/11 we've had time to suck in some air & reflect. Sure, when things like that happen, emotions cloud judgement, questions aren't asked & poor & hasty decisions are made. But that's no excuse for not reflecting & reconsidering when the initial emotional response subsides.

Immediately after the September 11 attacks, the rattus government invoked the provisions of the ANZUS Treaty which references the UN Security Council in Articles I, IV & VI.  UN Security Council resolutions 1368 & 1373 adopted before the US led invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October 2001 did not authorise the use of force, & didn't even mention Afghanistan.  We now know that the United States (External) "did not seek" specific legal support from the United Nations Security Council for its action in Afghanistan.

In early June, with hardly anyone noticing, Afghanistan became the longest war in US history. In Australia, John Faulkner says Australian troops will be deployed for another three years minimum, a prediction that US strategic analyst Daniel Ellsberg immediately dismissed as hopelessly optimistic. "The war will no more be over in three to five years than it is right now ... if Australians are committed to supporting this strategy, they can figure on 10, 20 & 30 years of involvement," he said.

Thirty years: that's a lot of war. And to what end?

The new British PM David Cameron recently told his troops: "This is not a war of choice, it is a war of necessity. If we left tomorrow, those [terrorist] training camps could come back tomorrow, because the Afghans aren't ready to look after their own security. As soon as they are ready, we can go home."

That's the line here too, but few of the war's supporters now even pretend to believe it, even as they proudly attend highly publicised military funerals & posture high-minded ideals in support of the continuation of the carnage, safe in the knowledge that they are not at risk.

Consider Clive Williams on the ABC's Drum website (in an article backing the Afghanistan mission, mind you, not denouncing it): "Australia's stated reason for being in Afghanistan is countering terrorism. The real reason is maintaining the close alliance with the US. In fact, our military presence in Afghanistan is more likely to lead to acts of terrorism in Australia than prevent them."

In other words, the public rationale for the deployment - the Cameron line about terrorist camps - might serve to fool the rubes (that's you, dear readers). But experts such as Williams know that Australia's really there to, as he approvingly puts it, "to score points with the US".

A couple of days ago, Michelle Grattan made the same argument: "Australia will stay in Afghanistan as long as the Americans want us to, which means as long as the US is there. It is one of those commitments to the alliance. We do it even though the prospects of 'victory' are probably bleak."

Let's recap then. The young men killing & dying for Australia have been told they're fighting terrorism. Our pundits know that's not true, that the public & the soldiers have been lied to from the get-go & that the "probably unwinnable" mission really constitutes a down payment on a strategic insurance policy.

And they're totally cool with that.

The question as to the price we are willing to pay thus hinges mostly on what we mean by "we". The people who dominate these discussions know they will pay no price whatsoever for even 30 years of war & are thus willing to fight to the last drop of someone else's blood.

It's not simply that the pundits recognise that they'll never personally end up poking around for IEDs on a road outside Kabul. It's also that for those writing about national security, there's no penalty for being wrong, so long, that is, as you're wrong from an enthusiastically pro-war perspective.

Recall, if you will, how the invasion was originally justified. In 2001, the pundits didn't share their insights about how the war was probably unwinnable. Nor did they explain how it was more likely to foster acts of terrorism than prevent them.

Rather, they dutifully yapped along with American talking points about restoring democracy, ending the drug trade, liberating women and so on & so forth. And where are we now? Well, there's a human embodiment of the distance between predictions & results in Afghanistan, & his name is Hamid Karzai. That suave "Afghan democrat" whose regime we've been fighting for is the same Karzai who consorts with warlords and drug gangs, who rigged the last election, who says he might join the Taliban, & who claims the US has been firing rockets at his peace conference.

Where, then, are the mea culpas from all the experts whose earnest predictions about Afghanistan went so terribly, terribly awry?

The point Tony Judt made about Iraq in the LRB a few years ago now applies equally to Afghanistan. "The only people qualified to speak on this matter," he explained, "it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially. Such insouciance in spite of - indeed because of - your past misjudgements recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist vindicated by events: "You & your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong'."

In the Huffington Post, Sahil Kapur makes a similar argument. The biggest obstacle, he says, to any genuine discussion of Afghanistan is that "[w]ar has become a fact of life for post-9/11 America - a permanent fixture of the Washington establishment that can hardly be challenged, lest anyone with insufficient pro-war credentials be dismissed as unserious & naive."

It's the same here, albeit on a lesser scale. If the topic's war, the default journalistic mode becomes a cynical tough guy swagger, Winston Churchill crossed with Mickey Spillane. We all know we need the US alliance - & if that requires sacrificing a few of our young men (& tens of thousands of nameless foreigners) to an unwinnable war that will actually make us less safe from terrorism, well, bring it on, baby.

Oh, & the latest news is that Afghanistan apparently sits on a mountain of unobtanium. Now, if that pans out, Ellsberg's estimate of a 30-year deployment suddenly looks very optimistic.

How did Grattan put it? "Australia will stay in Afghanistan as long as the Americans want us to, which means as long as the US is there."  Well, if Afghanistan's about to become the "Saudi Arabia of lithium", don't expect the Americans to go anywhere anytime soon.

They had no idea of how terrible it was. I used to look at their young faces and think of their mothers. Next day most of them would just be blood and bandages. Wherever you looked there would be these poor buggers on the side of the road, all wanting cigarettes, all busted up, some with arms and legs gone . . . now you can't tell me there is anything good about war - you think that's fair enough? 

Peter Casserly, WWI digger who declined to participate in ANZAC Day marches for some 85 years.