IN trying to civilise Afghanistan, we may have bitten off more than anyone can chew. For too many in that blighted land, the seventh century beckons.

WHEN, on a Sunday morning in September 1939, Prime Minister Robert Menzies announced that it was his "melancholy duty" to inform the nation it was once again at war, Australians wearily accepted the sacrifice to come.

A generation earlier, more than 60,000 Australians had died in what had been referred to as the Great War.

Across both wars just short of 100,000 Australians were killed.

That's 30 a day, every day, for every year of both wars.

We were in it for the long haul. The future of the free world was at stake. Australian lives would be sacrificed. That was the cost of freedom.

In August 1966, during the Battle of Long Tan, 18 Australians were killed, the bloodiest day for us of the Vietnam War. Eleven of the dead were conscripts, one was a student not old enough to vote.

It shocked the nation, but our prime minister vowed soon after that he was going "all the way with LBJ (US President Lyndon Baines Johnson)" and we must have agreed: Harold Holt won that November's federal election in a historic landslide, in no small part based on our enthusiasm for the war.

Six years later, Australians' view of that conflict - still the longest in our history - had changed and helped Gough Whitlam's Labor Party to power.

But the Liberals had been acutely aware that the nation's appetite for the war had waned and they were slowly withdrawing our men and women from the unwinnable contest, the last Australians being killed in combat in September 1971.

Five privates of the 4th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment died that day, a bloody, final punctuation mark in a war that had exhausted our country.

We were in Vietnam for the long haul; Australians had bravely won battles, but the nation's heart wasn't in it.

Neither is the heart any longer in the fight for Afghanistan, polls indicating that two-thirds of us want out.

The deaths over the weekend of three more Australian troops, and the wounding of six others, attacked by a so-called "rogue" Afghan soldier will further erode support for our presence there. As it should.

Our soldiers are adamant their job to train a reliable local defence force will not be completed by the Canberra-imposed deadline of 2014.

They'd know. When my colleague Ian McPhedran recently spent time with them in Afghanistan, he observed the local trainees.

They were lazy, ill-disciplined, untrustworthy and even mutinous.

They often dropped their loaded rifles to steal fruit from trees, rather than protect their people.

It's a curious thing that Prime Minister Julia Gillard, her predecessor Kevin Rudd, his predecessor John Howard, and the alternative prime minister Tony Abbott agree that Australia is there for the "long haul".

The long haul is never spelled out. That is because there is no achievable end in Afghanistan.

It is a long haul to a hell devised by Islamists who despise modernity, Western freedoms, and who see democracy and its concepts, such as equality for women and education for girls, as a full-on cultural assault.

These are men who wish to live by the backward ways of the seventh-century birth of their troubled religion.

We are wasting our time, our defence budget and the lives of our noble sons, by getting touchy-feely about building these people schools and bringing water to their villages when too many of them hate us and plan to kill our children.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://www.coveritlive.com/mobile.php/option=com_mobile/task=viewaltcast/altcast_code=10bc86a365" &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Who are Australian soldiers dying for? - Debate with Alan Howe from 1pm&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

When Europeans a century ago sat in smoke-filled drawing rooms and drew lines of administrative convenience through what had been their empires, they did so ignorant of the lives of those who would forever after be ruled by those geographic co-ordinates.

Those people resent it, and I don't blame them. Afghanistan is not a country and it never has been.

It is a collection of often uneducated, sexist, stubbornly prejudiced, rigidly narrow-minded, violent tribes - untrustworthy men who stabbed us in the back until we thought it a brilliant idea to give them weapons and training.

Now they shoot us.

We are in Afghanistan to rid them of the Taliban and perhaps introduce locals to the idea of democracy.

Fat chance. The Taliban's deadly response regularly costs allied lives.

Not that I am proposing a retreat from the War on Terror.

But when our significant other, the US, secretly organises talks between Afghan President Hamid Karzai's leadership and the ape-like Taliban, you know things aren't going so well.

Rather than expensively invest in troops on the ground, perhaps we should spend a fraction of that on decent intelligence and use unmanned drones to hunt and kill our prey.

The US drone attacks are working with greatly increased efficiency.

In recent months the allies' drones have lopped off some important heads from the Taliban/al-Qai'da Hydra.

But it grows more heads; Afghans are among the most fertile of nationalities and in their ranks are some of the most resentful people on the planet.

In the absence of measurable goals with a deadline that our troops believe they can achieve, we should think of better ways to combat this menace.

Relying more on Western technology that is the fruit of modern and wealthy democracies has a ring of common sense to it.

We'll kill some innocents along that way. That's war. It's a war on terror and we have a right to share the terror around.

Originally published as Who are Australian soldiers dying for?