It’s not often I find myself feeling sorry for Gordon Brown but his recent episode of bad letter-etiquette with Jacqui Janes, mother of guardsman killed in action Jamie Janes, made me feel a bit of sympathy for him.

After all, the guy does have only one good eye and let’s face it no amount of perfect letter writing technique would have eased Ms Janes’ grief at losing her son, but we can all understand her need to vent.

The fact is that media coverage of this war is getting out of hand. If the Second World War had been so keenly followed by the TV cameras, its every twist, dissected in the newspapers, we would probably have lost.

Remember “the walls have ears”? Back then folk understood the need for secrecy and knew that “careless talk costs lives”.

The Taliban? Shrouded in mystery . . . No-one really knows who or where they are and many of our cleverest men and women are hard at work day and night, trying to work out their next move.

They know only too well the value of being one step ahead; whereas here we are, filming everything we can, broadcasting every new development, questioning every decision our leaders make and ultimately only highlighting our own disorganisation and lack of solidarity on whether we should even be fighting in the first place.

The worry is that the Taliban are more than used to sitting out their enemies. They have lots of hills to hide in and waiting is their game. Because of our foolhardy news coverage, they know we cannot continue the war at its current pace, with our equipment shortages and dissent growing at our very involvement.

They are waiting. They know that sooner or later our troops will be forced to pull out. And when we do, they will be there to violently re-claim the unwilling population.

Of course it’s true problems in Afghanistan have nothing really to do with us. We don’t have to help and our first duty and obligation is, of course, to our own people.

But the truth is, that’s not the British way. It’s not a fully explainable phenomenon, I can’t give you the reasons why other than history but we’ve never been a nation to cross to the other side of the road at the first sign of trouble. Could we really allow the Taliban to commit atrocities on their own people once again and turn a blind eye to it?

The stakes are high but ultimately, helping out a country in crisis is part of what makes Britain the proud nation it is. Let’s get on with the job, pull out the TV cameras not the troops, and give our boys the one thing they need even more than equipment our support.