June has been a deadly month for Australian (five dead) and international (70 dead) forces in Afghanistan. At a precarious moment for the US in Afghanistan, and with a major military operation against the Taliban underway in the south, the loose lips of NATO commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, have made him a political casualty back in Washington.
Meanwhile in Australia an Essential Research poll shows 61 per cent of respondents say Australia should pull its troops out of Afghanistan.
Returning to Australia from Kabul for a few weeks and catching up on the poll I am struck by lurid online comment, which these days passes for discussion, on whether Aussie troops should go or stay in Afghanistan.
Commentary tracks through a weird miasma of old-left versus new-right trench exchanges, armchair military strategists and conspiracy theorists, including a piece of fabulist psychosis in which Israelis wired explosives to the Twin Towers as they were being constructed.
Back in the real Afghanistan the majority of the country's 28 million people scratch a living each day. Six million refugees (two million each in Iran and Pakistan) have returned to tents, and in some cases land or, if they are really lucky, housing.
During their absence the property of many people was occupied or bought and sold. It is one aspect of a land and resource rights crisis in Afghanistan that fuels ongoing conflict and instability among communities and between ethnic groups. Since Kabul's power is weak outside city limits, according to US Aid 'local elites, warlords and political factions control land and natural resources with intimidation'.
The refugees returning from Pakistan have brought back skills, and a love of cricket: an Afghan team played its first Twenty20 series in the Caribbean in May. They were knocked out pretty early. We didn't care: we cheered.
Unemployment figures whirl between 25 and 40 per cent. In relation to what? I wonder, as there are so few full-time jobs as we know them. Reliable data is scratchy in Afghanistan: the last census in 1979 was only partial and not completed.
I ask a young Afghan man during a job interview why he wants this position. 'To feed my family,' he shoots back. 'We don't have careers here.'
An Afghan colleague gives me an insight into what happens when the breadwinner dies. His friend, a municipal officer who'd recently married, was killed in a