Most Australians now oppose the conflict in Afghanistan. Yet, perversely, its very unpopularity has led to less rather than more public debate about the war, even — or perhaps especially — in the context of this election campaign.

It all makes an odd and unedifying contrast with asylum seekers, an issue on which the parties have justified their embrace of more-or-less openly voodoo policies by pointing to the polls. On refugees, apparently, there’s no choice but get into the gutter, because that’s what the people want. But, somehow, when it comes to Afghanistan, Labor and Liberal are jointly prepared to stare down public opinion to keep the war off the agenda.

It’s particularly strange, given that the situation seems to be approaching a turning point. In the SMH today, Dan Oakes notes: “As the NATO-led coalition grasps that it cannot win militarily in Afghanistan, talking with the Taliban is fast gaining favour as a way of bringing the West’s involvement in the country to an end.”

Well, what does Julia Gillard think about a confab with the Taliban? What kind of negotiated settlement would Tony Abbott be prepared to accept? Should we not, in the midst of an election, know the answers to that, particularly since such negotiations raise complex moral and political issues?

That is, on the one hand, the talks might, perhaps, mark the beginning of the end of the conflict. Certainly, a majority of Afghans (64% according to one poll) support negotiations with the Taliban — in the context of decades of war, talking’s got to look a lot better than shooting.

On the other, Hamid Karzai’s keen on talking to the Taliban (indeed, at one stage, he threatened to join them) at least in part because there’s not that much difference between the warlords he’s aligned with and many of those from the insurgency.

How then to ensure that what takes place is a reconciliation process offering some prospect of peace, not a deal stitched up between rival gangsters over the heads over the people? The Guardian quotes officials in Washington, Kabul and Islamabad to the effect that negotiations “would be conducted largely in secret, through a web of contacts, possibly involving Pakistan and Saudi Arabia or organisations with back-channel links to the Taliban”, none of which sounds terribly reassuring.

Unfortunately, there are now, almost certainly, no good solutions in Afghanistan.

But after nine years of involvement, Australians have a responsibility to push towards the least-worst outcome. A good first step would be insisting that Afghanistan becomes part of the electoral discussion, rather than being flagged as an issue “beyond politics”.

For instance, yesterday Gillard and Abbott suspended the election campaign to attend the funeral of Private Nathan Bewes, killed by a roadside bomb in Oruzgan Province.

Such services have become tragically common — Bewes was the 17th young Australian killed in Afghanistan. But rather than sparking more discussion about the war, the deaths have, quite counterintutively, dampened public debate.

Monash academic Kevin Foster — whose work on media coverage from Afghanistan itself (or rather the lack of it) is a must-read — points out that:

“In the US and the UK, the repatriation and burial of the dead is a matter for the family and the military, with the Defence Secretary/Defence Minister on hand only in exceptional circumstances.

“By contrast, the death of any Australian serviceman in Afghanistan is, by dint of the relatively small commitment of troops to the country and the resulting sensitivity to casualties, a political event that triggers a now familiar response from the nation’s elected leaders.”

Obviously, the participation of the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader in a funeral necessarily turns personal grieving into a political event — how could it not? There’s a qualitative difference between the specific agony suffered by the friends and family of the dead man, and the necessarily more abstract emotion experienced by politicians who didn’t know the soldier. By definition, they can’t celebrate the life of someone they never met and so to pay tribute they must resort to generic rhetoric about nation and service and so on.

Thus, as Foster says, “[I]n Australia the dead language of glorious sacrifice has made a comeback — if it ever went out of fashion. The determination of the nation’s leaders, senior ADF commanders and the media to embalm casualties in the language of ceremony abstracts them from the immediate circumstances that brought about their deaths.”

In other words, insofar as we talk about the conflict, we’re largely doing so in an almost Edwardian vocabulary grotesquely incapable of capturing the reality of this quintessentially modern war.

Of course, if it consoles heartbroken families to have political leaders on hand in their mourning, well, that’s entirely their right. But that’s no excuse for the rest of us. After nine years of war, there’s a responsibility to understand the politics of the conflict, especially as it approaches what might be its endgame.

Too many people have already died for us to do otherwise.