When Prime Minister Gillard opened the recent Parliamentary debate on Australia's involvement in Afghanistan she warned that our role might last for at least the rest of this decade. "Australia will not abandon Afghanistan," she told the parliament in a statement that revealed more about her transition to the Right than anything else.

For the Greens, Senator Brown said the PM should develop an exit strategy as soon as possible.

The Prime Minister's flagging of an ongoing intervention, possibly military, possibly for 10 years, is no substitute for her Government's responsibility to give Australia a clear exit strategy for its servicemen and servicewomen. . . . This Parliament should recall that faced with no prospect of clear victory, the Anzacs were withdrawn from Gallipoli in World War I precisely because the justification for them remaining in Gallipoli had become less persuasive than the justification for them leaving.

Should Australian troops . . . have their lives threatened daily because of a strategic stuff up of George Bush and John Howard? . . . We owe it to our people there to justify the growing toll of death and injury and their exposure to the increasing ugliness and violence of this protracted civil war.

Independent MPs Tony Windsor and Ron Oakeshott also want Australia out of Afghanistan quickly. Andrew Wilkie is also particularly critical.

As for the Americans, the New York Times comments (21 Oct 2101) that:

President George W. Bush shortchanged the Afghan fight for seven years. We continue to wonder whether, at this late date, the United States can achieve even minimal success against the Taliban and their allies.

The cost of the war is still rising. Nearly 600 coalition forces, including 400 Americans, have been killed there this year. Yet Mr. Obama and his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, are only now putting in place the pieces of a more coherent plan.

[Obama’s] administration is doubling down on the fight against the Taliban and showing mixed results. That may not sound like much, but even mixed results are an improvement over the utterly bleak situation of several months ago.

Senator Brown is right. Australia is not well served by its support of a half-baked allied non-strategy.

[T]wo of the most fundamental problems have yet to be addressed: the Afghan government’s lack of credibility with many of its own people; and Pakistan’s persistent double game, taking American aid while sheltering and abetting the Taliban.

Mr. Karzai's government is rife with corruption, and he has either dragged his feet or blocked efforts to clean up things. His supporters committed vast fraud in last year’s presidential election. . . . The Obama administration has yet to find a way to pressure or cajole Mr. Karzai into saving his own government.

Australia is foolish to entangle itself in this mess. We would do better to deliver development assistance that is linked neither to military intervention nor to the Karzai government.

It is possible.

Professor Hedley Beare, died about a month ago. A gifted teacher, Beare was founding head of the education departments of the Northern Territory and the ACT, which meant he led the creation of Australia's seventh and eighth education systems. Professor of education at Melbourne University for fourteen year to 1995, and prolific writer on schools and teaching. He was also an appointed a member of the NT Legislative Assembly and after cyclone Tracy in 1974, was in charge of managing the civilian evacuation, moving 28,000 people in eight days.

Beare was a Christian all his life. He read widely on church history, and for 15 years wrote columns for The Melbourne Anglican. And it's for that role that I am most indebted to him. I've long valued a list of tests by Beare, published in the Melbourne Anglican a few years ago, that help one assess what to take up that's new, what to stop doing—tasks to get rid of, to resign from, to give up or just quit.

• The test of Bliss: Is this activity something I really like doing, deep down? Is it something I really want to do?
• The test of Vocation: Is this something I am suited to doing, which appropriately makes use of my talents, and which is in keeping with my Christian and professional calling?
• The test of Uniqueness: Why me? Why have I been asked or approached? Is this something only I can do, for which I have unique competence?
• The test of Coherence: Does this activity harmonize with my current priorities and centres of interest?
• The test of Networking: Does (or will) this activity keep me in touch with significant people or activities, and will it do the same for my spouse or partner?
• The test of the Strategic: Is the audience or the target group for this exercise important enough to warrant the investment of my time and energy?
• The test of the Prophetic: Does this activity or assignment give me the opportunity to be prophetic (in the biblical sense)? Does the undertaking make me bold?
• The test of Remuneration: Who is meeting the costs of this assignment, literally?
• The test of Opportunities Foregone: Will this assignment prevent me from doing something else more important, or something which I must do, which I am already committed to do, or which I really want to do?
• Finally, the Test of Peace: At the primal level, does this assignment leave me feeling easy in my mind?

Beare advised: "One need hardly add that this review takes time; if I am not accorded that time, the answer is always 'no'. Because such a review combines inner work and prayer, you don't have to justify your decision or make excuses. 'Simply let your Yes be Yes and your No, No', Jesus advised (Matt 5:37)."

The Commonwealth Games are running quIte well and India has avoided serious humiliation, although there's been a steady stream of embarrassments.

Suresh Kalmadi, head of the organising committee, was roundly booed as he made his welcoming speech, and deservedly so. Cracks appeared in the running tracks. Australian athletes, the first to enter the stadium in the opening ceremony, were "treated like cattle" as they waited an hour in a stifling tunnel. Earlier, some venues were unfinished, a footbridge collapsed and rooms for athletes uninhabitable. There were bird droppings in the swimming pool. The scales used to weigh boxers were seriously inaccurate. The disqualification of the initial winner of the women's 100 metres may have been technically correct in the end but the handling of it was a disgrace. A large electronic scoreboard collapsed and was ruined when its mountings failed.

And so on, and on, and on.

Yet some athletes—diver Matthew Mitcham for instance—report that the facilities are fine are they having an enjoyable experience.

As always, some of the sporting achievements are superb. But few are there to witness them and the stands are almost empty. All in all it's a big yawn. All the more so as Australian dominance is so strong. Of the 206 events decided by early Tuesday, Australians (not Australia) had won 31%. The Indians and the English had each won about 15%.

The Economist mentions a letter also on the front page of the Times of India in which Azim Premji, head of Wipro, one of India's largest software firms, put the true cost of the games at $6 billion (way over budget) and asked: "Is this drain on public funds for the greater common good?" The Economist comments that India has not provided a convincing answer to that question.

We run them well, yet it's not for us in Australia to criticise India's priorities when we too spend huge sums on beer-and-circus public events like Olympic and Commonwealth Games, and Formula One motor races. But it's fair to be critical of corruption and waste.

Verlyn Klinkeborg's New York Times pieces on "The Rural Life" are a delightful source of reflection. For instance this on Really looking (2 Sep 10)

One day I can hear the faint rustle of autumn coming. The next day I can't. One evening summer leaks away into the cool night sky, and the next morning it's back again. But there is headway. Birdsong has gone, replaced by the whining bagpiping of the insect creation. I look out across the pasture as dusk begins and see a shining galaxy of airborne bugs. How would it be, I wonder, to have an awareness of the actual number of insects on this farm?

I ask myself a version of that question every day: "Have you ever really looked at . . . ?" You can fill in the blank yourself. But every day I feel blinded by familiarity. I open the hive, which is filled with honey, and the particularity of the honeybees, even their community, somehow escapes me, if only because I've been living with honeybees a good part of my life. I remember the phrase, "keep your eyes peeled," and maybe that's what I need, a good peeling.

Again and again, I find myself trying to really look at what I'm seeing. It happened the other afternoon, high on a nearby mountain. A dragonfly had settled on the denuded tip of a pine bough. It clung, still as only a dragonfly can be. Then it flicked upward and caught a midge and settled on the bough again, adjusting precisely into the wind. I see the dragonflies quivering through the insect clouds above my pasture, too. I always notice that there's no such thing as really looking.

What I want to be seeing is invisible anyway: the prehistoric depth of time embodied in the form of those dragonflies, the pressure of life itself, the web of relations that bind us all together. I find myself trying to witness the moment when the accident of life becomes a continued purpose. But this is a small farm, and, being human, I keep coming up against the limits of what a human can see.

This morning I found a spider resting — or perhaps hunting — on the leaf of an oakleaf hydrangea, the axis of the spider's abdomen perfectly aligned with the axis of the leaf. What I noticed was the symmetry of their placement, the way spider and leaf resembled each other. What I wanted to notice was the spider's intent. If I could, I would have asked it, "What are you doing?" Or, better yet, "Who are you?" But all I could do was look — and notice that I was looking — and make the best of the sight I'd seen.

I need to not only look but to see.