The Sewer That Is Afghanistan

SOME 1,000 Australian troops departed yesterday for Afghanistan, where 32 of their comrades have been killed and many others wounded.

This is what they are fighting for.

Enough already. Let the natives wallow in their "cultural issues". Australians have no business being there.

UPDATE: Actually, there is a way out of this mess -- one that might easily be portrayed as honouring Australia's obligation to support the Karzai kleptocracy while simultaneously solving another headache.

Imagine, just for argument's sake, that every male boat person arriving on our shores was sent not to a processing facility but to an Army base, where they would be trained, equipped and sent back to Afghanistan to fight for their own country's future.

Who can doubt the flow of "asylum seekers" would end within days of such an announcement?

Why Are We In Afghanistan?

THREE more diggers dead, seven wounded -- and for what? This national interest both Gillard and Abbott go on about, what is it? The need to defend a corrupt government which has neither means nor intention of introducing Afghanistan to the most basic of Enlightenment values? To further destabilise Pakistan? To safeguard a kleptocracy quite happy to see a blogger sentenced to death for the heinous crime of "questioning Islam"?

This is why three more Australian lives been squandered. What a sick, stupid, obscene joke.

We were right to oust the Taliban in the days after 9/11. That was the mission and it was achieved with courage and competence. Now it is touchy-feely soldiering -- building roads and attempting by gentle, culturally sensitive means to persuade an insane, inbred smear of flyblown villagers and boy-buggerers that there might be some advantages to following the rest of the world's lead and leave the seventh century behind.

Osama is dead, finally. Now is the moment to throw up a cordon sanitaire around Afghanistan, patrol it with drones and if the place shows the slightest sign of re-establishing terrorist camps, blow them up from a safe, stand-off distance.

In the meantime, let's declare victory and go home.

Some people like to wallow in filth. Let them. Leave them to their fun before another drop of Australian blood is squandered.