This counts as an apology, of sorts. My opinion is intact - if anything, it has deepened - but I am reminded that mere glibness is a nasty trait, not least in a journalist. For several years I have been saying - loftily, airily, endlessly - that Britain's involvement in Afghanistan is "stupid". How clever of me.

There is nothing in the least stupid about eight good men dead in a night and a day. Three 18-year-olds, boy soldiers, loyal, professional - and their comrades - have just left vast, aching spaces in the lives of people I will never meet. Honour to them.

The corpses are coming off the big transport as I write. The remains arrive at Wootton Bassett, amid the sunny country streets and lanes of Wiltshire.

Afghanistan is not Vietnam. The assumed connection is ignorant, ahistorical and simply too convenient. For one thing, Britain's Labour Party once possessed a leader too wily - and studious of history - to allow another post-imperial morass. Harold Wilson remembered Suez, and did not attempt to reconfigure the fiction some call a special relationship.

Wilson's tortured governments were guided, in fact, by realism. A two-fold thing. First, they said, we cannot. Secondly, as they did not fear to add, we should not.

Risk blood, money, families and lives to stop a domino from trembling in Indochina? The French had a couple of opinions on that score. The world today has a couple of opinions regarding Afghanistan.

This is, for one thing, Barack Obama's nightmare. He has chosen this ground merely to prove that he is not "soft" towards this year's nightmare. Our own head of government is, meanwhile, the stammering echo of incoherence. Troops, he says, but not in numbers. Money, he adds, but never enough. Equipped? I leave that question to the sad rites of Wootton Bassett.

The Vietnam parallel is wrong but revealing. The process is the same. You always need "more"

when dealing with an indigenous insurgency. Choppers, air-support, "boots on the ground" and a political opportunist - say one David "Dave" Cameron - whose strategy involves nothing better than more blood-letting? It goes on. It worsens. It becomes hideous.

The Tory leader is not yet in charge of such things, mercifully.

Meanwhile, the present government tells me, and you, that Afghans must be killed, in their thousands, to keep terrorism off our streets. That's just a lie. A real, actual, fantastic lie: a crime.

If you wish to be rid of al Qaeda, pay the rag-tag Taliban groups one-tenth of the cost of our military efforts just to do the job. Then leave their poppy fields alone.

Then forget Karzai's astoundingly corrupt puppet state. Then get the boys, the boys who want to be proud of the uniform, home.

Glib again, I notice. All the world is easy when you sit in an armchair: I understand. But I also know insidious rhetoric when I smell it. For how long "must" we remain in Afghanistan? This week's best quote, from the MoD, is "possibly a decade". And the statement is not regarded as remotely surreal.

Decent, right-thinking people are not supposed to say that Obama could turn out to be worse than George W Bush. I had better say it instead, then.

The headlines tell me that more have died in one piece of real estate than in another. I say: stop lying; think Vietnam. Don't tell me about jihad on my streets; don't tell me that the answer to eight dead between pallid sunsets is more helicopters; don't make me glib again.

My great-grandfather had a brother who died, I'm told, in a place called Mesopotamia. Another of those great-grandads signed up, with the usual lies, at 15, and wound up in India. I think he was keeping us all safe, back in 1870, from "howling Afghans". Perhaps he truly was.

I watch the coffins being handled with reverence. It seems to me that they are almost being caressed. I see the old soldiers on the streets of Wootton Bassett.

Our chosen war in Afghanistan is stupid, and wrong, and founded on a deceit. If the history of Britain and its armed forces impinges even slightly on your memory, you will know that we never, ever give those pale young men the kit, and never care enough when their shattered bodies return.

So we go after those who - try this paradox - make our democratic choices on our behalf. In the case of Afghanistan, they are actually dishonest. Gordon Brown pretends to placate America while pretending to care for our children. In my opinion, that won't do. Why are we there? Why are so many dying? Which piece of nonsense are we passing off as policy this week?

I lived for a little while quite close to a Scottish barracks. It was fun, sometimes, to watch the ever-polite boys blush in the supermarket queue beneath the jokes of the girls on the tills.

But then you thought: where will they be tomorrow? Basra? Helmand? You can be professionally glib, but stupid remains a decent word.

An opinion poll says that "British opinion" is divided over Afghanistan. I would be surprised if things were otherwise. We revere our needless dead: we, too, are human. But we are too often distracted, I think, by our humanity. I want to know who is responsible.

Failing that, I return to my meagre O-Grade English, and to Wilfred Owen. You remember, surely? The passing bells? And those who die "like cattle"?