In all the time I've been writing for the Herald, I've never got fewer responses to anything I have ever written than to a recent piece arguing against redeploying SAS troops to Afghanistan. There was a whopping total of three replies, two from family friends.

To put this in depressing perspective, a column with a link to a feminine razor commercial dubbed "Mow the Lawn" got 1600 hits before my website crashed.

There were no rebuttals - brutal or benign. Just dead silence. In my mind I saw where this would turn - the inevitable, tragic profile this paper and others will run when our first SAS casualty comes home in a body bag. The description of a life cut short, a family left to mourn - and for what?

We believe in a myth. Obama, international coalition forces [ISAF], and now John Key, have bought into the fantasy that waging this war will contain terrorism.

What else can they say? That in reality, eight years of fighting has shown that US/coalition actions have helped breed terrorism instead of contain it?

We will lose in Afghanistan. We will lose because no one - including Barack Obama - has figured out what winning realistically looks like.

What is the best-case scenario that could fit into today's ugly reality? That the corrupt Karzai puppet government becomes miraculously effective in keeping his poppy princes in line under US envoy Richard Holbrooke's tutelage?

That al Qaeda moves on to the greener pastures of say, Iraq, to fight another day? That the Taleban is contained in the Swat valley long enough to call the Afghan surge a success?

By any measure, these are ugly, pyrrhic victories. There is a reason they call Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires". The British, the Soviets, and now American/coalition troops will go down in defeat in a country that has long defied its own centralised government for disparate tribal ones.

On a recent visit to the States two weeks ago, I sat at breakfast with an American family and heard the same justification for war we've been handed for eight years. We cannot allow Afghanistan to become a haven for terrorism again.

As a world superpower, it is America and the coalition's duty to rid the world of this cancer, especially before it spills further into nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Look at the reality in front of us today. We have already lost on both counts.