The cloak of a military campaign has been adopted to inflate the importance of the asylum seeker issue and to justify the Abbott Government's cult of secrecy, writes Mungo MacCallum.

Operation Sovereign Borders is in real danger of spinning out of control.

Not only are Generalissimo Tony Abbott and his First Sea Lord Scott Morrison now firmly ensconced in Fantasy Land (the happiest kingdom of them all), but their fantasies are becoming a serious risk to Australia's reputation and even its wellbeing.

It is no longer just a matter of boys playing battleships in the bathtub, as Senator Sarah Hanson-Young indulgently describes it; a series of statements from various participants last week make it clear that reality is starting to overtake the rhetoric.

Abbott opened the bidding by justifying his paranoid secrecy over the whole issue with the remark: "If we were at war, we would not be giving out information that is of use to the enemy." We were engaged in a "fierce contest" with the people smugglers; we had to stop the boats because it was a matter of our national sovereignty. In other words, we actually were at war.

Now hang on a moment. A war is an armed conflict between nation states about the conquest of territory or at least a dominant economic advantage. A few score people smugglers pose no conceivable threat to Australia and Abbott knows it. When he talks of "national sovereignty", all he really means is his own pride; he has puffed up the concept to try and lock the rest of us behind his political posturing. To compare the current situation with war is to insult and belittle those who fight and suffer in real wars, the very soldiers Abbott affects to idolise at every photo opportunity he can arrange.

The cloak of a military campaign against the hapless asylum seekers has been adopted as political camouflage, partly to inflate the importance of what is, by any normal measure, no more than an irritant, and partly to justify the cult of secrecy ("we do not comment on operational matters") that Abbott and Morrison have invoked to cover their own mismanagement. And it appears that there is a fair amount to cover.

Despite Abbott having fervently and repeatedly denied after the election that he had a policy to "tow back" boats to Indonesia, it now appears that in two cases that is precisely what has happened; and in two others, perhaps three, boats were "pushed" back before being effectively abandoned in Indonesian waters. In international law, this is a distinction without a difference - both procedures are illegal.

Abbott's policy, that boats would be "turned back when it is safe to do so", was always dubious, and depended on Indonesian co-operation. This was never going to be forthcoming and again last week both the foreign minister, Marty Natalegawa, and the office of president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono reiterated that the policy was unacceptable. Any hope that it might be tacitly approved, as suggested by reports that the Indonesian military chief General Moeldoko had given a nod and a wink to his Australian counterpart General David Hurley, were firmly repudiated.

And now the United Nations High Commission on Refugees is demanding an explanation of the incidents from Canberra, and also of reports that Australia had bought large lifeboats from Singapore, which will be used to facilitate further turn-arounds from unseaworthy Indonesian vessels. This totally unprecedented idea has been widely ridiculed in the Australian media, but it is another indication of Abbott's obsessive single-mindedness: stop the boats at many cost, and we do mean any.

But the stakes are getting higher. The head of the Indonesian parliament's foreign affairs committee, Mahfudz Siddiq, has said that the lifeboat ploy means that he Australian government plans to become a people smuggler itself, despatching boat loads of unauthorised immigrants into another country's territorial waters. And, as the Australian Navy has been used to repel boats from Indonesia, so the Indonesian navy may have to repel the boats from Australia. The situation could escalate quickly and very dangerously. Suddenly Kevin Rudd's pre-election warnings of a possible military confrontation between to the two countries look a lot less fanciful.

The air needs to be cleared, urgently, and a full and frank public statement by Abbott would appear to be the only way to do it. Both the Indonesian government and people and the Australian people need to be told just what the policy is, what if any are its limits, and how it works on a day-by-day basis. As it is, trust and support are being dissipated in a cloud of rumour and scuttlebutt. And, as Bill Shorten and numerous others have pointed out, it is ludicrous that Australians are getting more information from the Jakarta Post than from their own government. Even if this was a real war, the situation would be unacceptable.

In the eyes of the rest of the world, Australia's hardline approach looks selfish and primitive - even barbaric. In Australia, a total of 7,983 boat people arrived in 2011-2012 - the time the great panic over unauthorised arrivals set in. In Italy, 30,100 migrants arrived by boat from North Africa between January 1 and September 30 last year. Yet the Italian government handled the situation calmly and humanely - there was never any talk of using military operations to turn boats back, or of offshore prison camps, or of temporary protection visas or any of the paraphernalia of cruelty successive Australian governments have employed as a deterrent. Instead, the asylum seekers were recognised by everyone from the Pope down as neighbours in need - not always refugees in the full and technical sense, but the wretched of the earth, to be treated with compassion and understanding.

But far from following this pontifical lead, Abbott and Morrison have consistently taken the low road of persecution, secrecy and shame. And, like their operational matters, they have ended up lost and confused - and all at sea.

Mungo MacCallum is a political journalist and commentator. View his full profile here.