Everyone has a tale. The writer William McIlvanney said once that his great novel Docherty was impelled by a need to stand witness for all the common folk whose lives never became footnotes. That came to mind yesterday, at 10.59am, or thereabouts.

At the Cenotaph in London, and at Verdun in northernmost France, there was a swirl of the befrogged and beribboned. So TV told me. Presidents, princes and prime ministers; dull men in dull suits; bugles and bands and period style: the rites of a martial culture, less remembrance than the weird perpetuated cult of remembrance.

So I remembered. Or rather, I weighed up bits and pieces, as best I could. For me, it was a very small difference of family opinion over Private Alfred Mackay, my grandfather's brother, of whom we know nothing.

Grandad lost everything in those days: mother, siblings, family. War, diphtheria and the Great Flu took away a small tribe, Sutherland to Edinburgh. Everyone has a tale. Young Alfred died - I still have the piece of consolatory paper - for King and Country. There is no argument over it. But where did he die?

I grew up believing Alfred was consumed in the blazing debris of a shellburst on the hellish beaches of the Dardanelles. Regimental records would say it is likely, but I hear I am mistaken. Alfred drowned in sand: true enough. He died as squaddies die. But his bones lie, I'm told, in "Mesopotamia". Lacking humour or history, we call it Iraq.

What is the opposite, rhetorically, of poetic justice? I think it might involve the regimental cap badges and banners recording all the honest deaths in dishonest British wars, all the wisdom bought with blood from rank stupidity. I think it might have something to do with the oddity of Remembrance: no-one really remembers. And no-one cares to see that forbearance, as a colleague puts it, is still being deployed as idiocy's excuse.

Notice how reverence for the dead of the Somme is employed now to justify criminal air-strikes in Helmand. Witness while 4100 of our people remain in Basra while car bombs are detonated in Baghdad and 112-year-old veterans of the trenches are wheeled before the cameras. Then contemplate the rejoicings attending a new American president who, "anti-war" and all, inclines towards a shoot-em-up surge in Afghanistan, where our real problems are said to lie.

Who are we, exactly? Yet another coroner reports that yet another young man has been ill-served by his country. Yet another defence secretary insists that all is well. David Hicks, 26, was "unlawfully killed", in the professional opinion of coroner David Masters, because he was afforded scant protection from shrapnel. John Hutton, newest manager at the Ministry of War, answers with pieties, concern, the claim that killing children ("fighting terror") has become a national interest, and invocations of the Nazis.

Such nonsense is reported, by no accident, on the day Europe attempts to understand Verdun and Vimy Ridge. Our left-of-centre (I am therefore sinister) Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, dodges calls for further gore from the madly-leftish US President-elect, Barack Obama. Our encrusted biggest military chief, Sir Jock Stirrup, says bleeding battalions need a break. Yet the wars go on. Funny, that.

A billion here, a billion there, noises of tax cuts and spending "choices" elsewhere: still, no-one states the obvious. If a hegemonic western economic order is exhausted, our wars are little better than gangsterism. Or try this patriotic riddle. When Gordon Brown borrows big to "kick-start" our economy, should he ask a Gulf Arab sovereign wealth fund if it needs to know, or minds, about all the Muslim peasants at the wrong end of the resulting munitions?

Which is to say: who is paying, currently, for the west's holy wars? The US is contemplating the wrong end of $11 trillion of national debt. Britain is leveraged, somewhat. When last the Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stieglitz looked, America had relieved itself of $3 trillion all over dusty Iraq. But suddenly - and one needs to check Saint Obama's record on this score - victory in Afghanistan is essential for the world's new dawn. Essential to whom?

An Anglican thoughtful squad was worrying, yesterday morning, over the role of its creed in the annual Remembrance rites. Ekklesia - Greek even to the Greeks, I suspect - suggested that faith and the fallen were being conscripted for a base contemporary purpose. I would not be wholly surprised. I would want to know one thing, however: what is that purpose, exactly?

There are upwards of 50,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan. Some 20,000 are American, more than 8000 are British. The rest - even the two Spanish boys killed the other day - subsist in foreign parts because their governments believe in a cause, or believe in treaties, or pretend to believe in both. I remain, to be polite, baffled.

The geopolitical stuff is a parlour game, but coherent. Russia, China, Pakistan, pipelines and jihad: got it. At Langley or Foggy Bottom they probably while away the hours on scripts for Afghanistan IV: Kick Butt. But why are "we" in Afghanistan? Why is the next US president letting it be known, loudly, that he wants more of our daft boys at risk? And - the eternal question for British statecraft - why do we never demur?

The connection between the Taliban and bin Laden's recruitment agency requires more attention than it has been given. For a gaping west, the two have been conflated, but this seems implausible. The point might be that those offering the fibs know better, that they know - Mr Obama included - about the jihadi nuances. And they also know that there has been a deplorable shortfall in terroristic outrage lately.

The carnage is hideous, when it happens. The assault on the Twin Towers was stupendous. But - and how else to put this without appearing to seem obnoxious? - not a lot has happened since. Not much help there, one assumes, for a manipulated blog. So here's the tally: some horrific bombings; some basic terror rhetoric and, better, a deal of important police work thereafter.

But a clash fundamental to civilisation itself? The Provisional IRA wrought more havoc, on some very small islands, than anything bin Laden has managed. Yet we did not, in the space of three decades, send armies to small countries to teach the Provies a lesson.

It is a shame to be the cloudy one on a parade day in ObamaWorld. It is hard not to notice, nevertheless, that one of the first acts of the new guy is a dance step - to a traditional military-industrial waltz-time - familiar to old guys. More troops in Afghanistan? More British troops, if we would be so kind? And if we forgot to ask the reason why, so much the better?

The old men come and they go. The lucky ones get to become old. The smart ones get the chance to prevent the others from reaching a happy old age. The smart ones get to send the stupid ones to places such as Afghanistan.

"Yes We Can"? If you will. But when next year in Helmand a landslip is puked up by a shellburst on a dun-coloured hillside, some shade of my Alfred may not have his expletive deleted. Tramp that dirt down.