I’ve been trying to follow the odd way in which the conflict in Afghanistan has been dramatised this week, courtesy of The Sun.

Like most people, I couldn’t understand why the newspaper should pick on Gordon Brown in an area, hand-writing, that was so closely related to visual impairment. Then when I glanced at a picture of the offending letter, the hand-writing didn’t seem all that bad to me. I’m not sure if I would have rung up Mrs. Janes if I was the Prime Minister but I could see why she would take the opportunity to take him to task about armed forces equipment.

Then it came to light that the BBC had already reported that there had been a helicopter available to rescue Guardsman Janes. However, this part of the story had been completely buried after it emerged mid-week. This seems to have let the government off the hook for their record on budget cuts for the services.

The lesson from all this would seem to be that this is cock-eyed way of conducting a debate about government policy on military equipment and the conflict in Helmand. It’s not even as if the conflict is devoid of interest; it’s packed with all the interest that anyone could ask for. However, the government and the public seem to be conspiring not to give it the attention that it deserves. I can see that the Prime Minister wouldn’t want to be seen to be exploiting the military situation to divert attention from the government’s woes at home but there’s more to it than that, I suspect. There’s a sense in which, despite the immediacy of modern media, that a foreign war just doesn’t seem real enough to government or people. The conflict is remote because it was neither planned nor envisaged; it doesn’t relate to the modern Britain of beacons and flagships and staff incentive schemes.

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The UK government must be wishing that it had the luxury of consulting more or less privately about deploying more troops to Afghanistan. In the US impatience with President Obama’s seeming indecision about raising the stakes seems to be growing but delaying also seems to be part of his prerogative. The delayed decision may turn out to be the worst mistake of his presidency but the US’s executive branch is allowed to delay. In the UK there doesn’t seem to be allowed a ‘wait’ option.

This puts the UK government in the awkward position of having to making policy when, presumably, they are in the dark themselves as to whether the US policy (when it sees the light of day) will vindicate them or make them look foolish.

Also, the UK government seem to be guinea pigs when it comes to providing a rationale for whatever the policy is. The government say they want assurances from President Karzai on stamping out corruption and so on – the media ask them why helping our troops should be contingent on what Karzai does or doesn’t do. Presumably, if they said they were sending reinforcements because it will make the existing troops safer, critics would say the Afghan campaign has developed a momentum of its own that has nothing to do with the Britain’s national interests.

At the end of a year in which law and order in Pakistan has been so threatened the argument that deployment in Afghanistan is making the UK safer is undergoing alteration. The terrorist threat may have always come via Pakistan but if Pakistan were to descend into chaos, much more drastic measures would be needed; including very restricted travel between Pakistan and the UK. This would put the UK government in a very uncomfortable position indeed.

To prevent the situation spinning out of control in this way the Pakistan government needs considerable help, very sensitively delivered. In the end this could mean the Afghan and Pakistani governments and the western allies working much more closely in concert, camped around a kind of Pashtun reservation under Taliban control, which it would be extremely difficult for anyone to enter or leave.

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No walk this week owing to lousy weather and having some gardening to do. Though I say so myself, the garden is looking quite trim right now. So far nothing has been damaged by the high winds although a fence panel has blown down in the next door garden. My internet connection is painfully slow – is that because everybody’s stuck at home or because some lines are down? - so I may not get around to loading up this post until tomorrow. I haven’t finished any good books recently.

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Interested to hear that David Miliband's friends and allies don't want him moving to Brussels to be High Representative. Do they really thnk he's the next Labour Prime Minister or do they want him to be caretaker during the 'wilderness years'? Would he be a thorn in the flesh for David Cameron?

thinking about the next government, how good a manager would David Cameron be?

Actually, I'm still hoping for a hung Parliament.

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