A sombre milestone was recorded last week in the Afghanistan
war: the 3000th Coalition death. He was a 26-year-old American
sailor, assigned to the US Naval Forces in Bahrain in support of
the war.  The death barely registered in Australia, but then
here - as in other Coalition nations - the focus is on the
scramble for the exit from Afghanistan. France is just the
latest nation to announce an earlier-than-planned withdrawal
(the end of this year).  The images are confronting. Bodies are
truncated; bandaged men are missing limbs, their faces and
bodies burned and scarred.   Politicians and the public are
resolute. They want the bloody and costly post-September 11 wars
to be gone, erased, left behind - and for these civilians they
pretty soon will be. For the veterans of the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars, of course, this isn't possible, and they will
forever live with the physical and mental legacies of their
military service.  And so as the conflicts which dominated our
national discourses for the past decade com