To meet the shocking military threat of unarmed civilian refugees, many of them women and children, the Howard Government sent a guided missile destroyer, two Anzac frigates, a supply ship, a transport ship, an unknown number of patrol boats, four PC-3 Orion maritime surveillance aircraft and a detachment of Special Air Service soldiers.

To the war against terrorism we have promised, should the Americans want them, two Orion aircraft, 150 SAS troopers, an Anzac frigate, possibly a naval command ship and two Boeing 707 air-to-air refuelling aircraft.

God help the Americans if their military effort relies on our 30-year-old 707s. They're not exactly state-of-the-art. They double as VIP planes and one of them broke down with Paul Keating in it, the other with John Howard aboard (twice).

The truth is our military commitment to the war against terrorism is pure tokenism. The US has not assembled an especially large force in the vicinity of Afghanistan because it is not planning a massive ground operation. It certainly doesn't need our ordnance. Our SAS troops are magnificent and deserve everybody's respect, but am I the only person to find it a bit creepy that we have to find a way of putting Australian soldiers' lives at risk to give an additional political charge to our wholly political and token commitment? The only significance of our involvement is political, so that the Americans can present it as a coalition of nations rather than a unilateral effort. At that level it is valuable and sensible, but let's keep a sense of reality about what we are doing.

Certainly we made far bigger military commitments to East Timor, Somalia and Cambodia, and in these operations our forces made a real difference.

Of course, where we should have made a difference in the war against terrorism is at the regional level. The contrast here between Howard and Tony Blair is most instructive.

In Blair, the US has an activist ally. Look at the way Blair can go to India and Pakistan as a key coalition interlocutor, trusted and credible in both places.

Australia should have been pivotal in this type of role because we live next to the biggest Muslim nation in the world, Indonesia. But our Prime Minister cannot get the Indonesian President even to return his phone calls.

Howard is deriving wholly unjustified leadership plaudits for an exercise in which he has done no more than read the cue cards and wait for the applause. No Australian prime minister, no potential prime minister, would have done less to support the Americans in the war against terrorism.

But we have been useless in regional terms because our regional diplomatic position is so weak. Can anyone really imagine our PM travelling through South-East Asia co-ordinating a regional response to the war on terrorism, or engaging the Indonesian public through imaginative, inclusive symbolism, bringing to life the distinction between a war on terrorism and a war on Islam? Howard has demonstrated political skill in all this, but it is not a first cousin of leadership. Whereas his Government's behaviour on refugees has been truly vile. Is there no one else in Australia who finds it frankly unbelievable that the Australian navy could be firing live ammunition above the heads of a boatload of refugees? Before the Howard Government constructed the great adventure of the Tampa refugees, Australia already had the harshest, cruellest, most punitive policy of dealing with asylum-seekers who arrived on our shores of any developed country.

Now we have attempted to push boats away from our shores, to use force to prevent refugees from claiming asylum.

Australians should remember that we were intimately involved in the crafting of the 1951 UN convention on refugees. It was one of the most fundamental of the elements of the postwar international order. It was ratified in Australia by that great fellow traveller of the Left, that notorious figure of political correctness, Robert Menzies.

IT obliges us simply to give shelter to people fleeing a well-grounded fear of persecution. Yet here we are, willing to wage war with our mighty fleet of 707 VIP aircraft, against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which our ally the US President has described as one of the most repressive regimes in the world, yet the Government has apparently convinced us that people fleeing this regime cannot be genuine refugees.

We are certainly in violation of our international treaty obligations but, worse than that, we are in violation of ourselves, of our own identity and values.

Here Howard has exercised leadership of a wholly negative kind. He has at different times in his career sought to make political benefit by identifying people on the basis of race - most famously his 1988 comments that if people thought the rate of Asian immigration were too high it should be reduced.

Before, this has always backfired on him politically. This time, in Afghan Muslim refugees, whom his Government has relentlessly demonised for years, he seems to have found a group so unpopular and a framework so useful for him that he will succeed politically. It might be leadership, but it has nothing to do with the national interest.