There is a fair bit of war fever building up in Britain at the moment. Previously unknown Wooton Bassett has made its name as the town that lines up to salute the coffins of British soldiers who get themselves killed in Afghanistan. From the liberal Channel 4 News to the Daily Telegraph and all points in between Gordon Brown is getting pasted not for fighting a war in someone else’s country, but for not doing it well enough.

As The Sun points out “our (sic) troops have a paltry ratio of one chopper for every 700 soldiers, our US allies have 150 Chinooks and Blackhawks for their 29,000 troops — a ratio of one for every 200.”

That is pretty much the terrain of the debate now and it is shading over into demands from some anti-war activists to “support the troops” by “bringing them home”. The British squaddie is being transformed into an amalgam of the saintly martyred Jade Goody and an Oxfam outreach worker. This follows fifteen British fatalities in Helmand in under a fortnight and while that is more than an army wants to lose it is hardly the Dieppe Raid and brings the total up to 184 – barely a couple of decent sized Afghan wedding parties. The claimed justifications for this that British cities are made safer by killing Afghans and the British army is there to bring peace and progress to the natives are too ludicrous to ridicule.

Brown doesn’t seem to know which way to turn. He inherited Blair’s wars and there was an unspoken hope among some Labour supporters that he would look for a way out, though the evidence for this was hard to find. Instead as the fighting gets a bit more arduous he’s taken to bragging, not altogether honestly about how much more money he is spending. The dreadful Bob Ainsworth is saying been an “84 per cent increase in helicopter flying hours” in Afghanistan , and promised that ministers will spend £6 billion on helicopters “over the coming years.” According to the Telegraph the budget for procuring helicopters in 2008/09 was £448 million. 2001/02, the MoD budget for “helicopter procurement” was £842 million. In 2001/02 it was £842 million. If there’s one thing worse than a Labour warmonger it’s a deceitful Labour warmonger.

Two things seem to underlie this “debate”. The first is an idea that British troops should be free to go anywhere they want to kill and torture but that they shouldn’t get killed. That’s the locals’ job. The second is that Brown is vulnerable to attack from the right and in the spending cuts that he is planning military spending is spared the type of cuts that we’ll see in socially useful spending. Labour’s long pro-imperial tradition makes it easier to subject it to this critique.

Afghanistan is not yet an unpopular war and you would need a very special microscope to detect any signs of mass reaction against it. The novel feature about it is the apotheosis of one of the groups of killers taking part in it for no discernible reason. The utter lack of sympathy for their victims is rather more predictable.