So was the great victory a sham?

We forget too easily that governments wage war to win and do not greatly worry how they do it. Their ideal would be: "Tell the people nothing until a war is over and then tell them who won." In the meantime they are prepared to lie, suppress, manipulate, distort and spin to try to keep the media - and thus the public - on side. But every now and then they get caught out. Four months ago the Prime Minister told us that the Taliban had collapsed and the war in Afghanistan was as good as over. Then on Monday the Blair government announced that a force of 1,700 British commandos was being sent to Afghanistan to fight a resurgent al Qaeda. No wonder Blair scuttled out of the Commons moments before Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon made the announcement.

How could he have explained the contradiction? Over- optimism? Wrong information from the Pentagon? Faulty intelligence? Or that public support for the use of overwhelming force by two powerful industrial nations on a Third World agricultural one already in the grip of a famine might ebb away unless he could promise a quick conclusion.

As Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's director of communications and strategy (a euphemism for director of propaganda), has implied often enough, perception is often as important as reality. It was important last November that the public perceived that the war in Afghanistan was as good as over - whether it was or not.

One group of professionals was in a position to correct this and tell us the truth - the war correspondents. But a combination of circumstances has neutralised them. First they had enormous difficulty in getting into Afghanistan and had to report from across the borders in nearby countries.

When they did eventually get in, it turned out to be very dangerous and they died in large numbers - eight before the end of the year. Until the American forces ran into trouble with the al Qaeda earlier this month, it was actually safer to be a soldier than a war correspondent.

The kidnapping and execution of the Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl raised further the threshold of acceptable risk. It is not that war correspondents were not prepared to take that risk but that their editors - and their organisations' insurers - responded by keeping their correspondents out of trouble spots. This, of course, suits governments and the military. They do not want reporters peering over soldiers' shoulders. They agree with the noted military historian Sir John Keegan, who says that the media should concentrate less on "nosy-parkering" and leave the military to perform its task. "What's happening at the front is none of the media's business, frankly. It's their duty to report the number of dead and wounded, but anything else is media prurience."

But this attitude can be disastrous. Under pressure to report something, lesser war correspondents make it up. A Greek TV journalist produced a riveting report from inside Afghanistan at a time when no one had been allowed to enter. An expert who knew the country well pointed out that it had all been filmed in Pakistan.

Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera, who went to Afghanistan armed so that he could kill Osama bin Laden on behalf of his network, ended up admitting to faking a dispatch. He blamed "the fog of war" and his editors forgave him.

And as al Qaeda collapsed - or withdrew to fight another day, depending on whom you believed - readers who were interested to know the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden could choose between: digging his own grave (the Sun); planning his live suicide for the Arab TV network Al Jazeera (the Mirror); directing his troops on horseback (CNN); or sitting in his seven-floor home in a mountain cave with the family car parked in the driveway (The Times).

Serious correspondents who eschewed this sort of flummery and who wanted to satisfy their readers' thirst for some enlightening information about the war, were thus forced to accept official sources. Both the American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Geoff Hoon made it crystal clear that these correspondents could not expect the same sort of co-operation they had received in, say, Vietnam, the Falklands, the Gulf War, or even Kosovo. What strikes viewers of the televised news conferences at the Pentagon, is the dismissive contempt with which the journalists are treatedby generals. "How many al Qaeda were killed, general?" - "I don't want to discuss casualties." "Were any of our troops killed?" - "I'm not going to get into that." Briefings in Britain are little better.

Thus the reporting of war has come full circle. Before William Howard Russell of The Times became the first civilian war correspondent in the Crimean War (1854-56), generals reported their own wars - Caesar on the invasion of Gaul, Wellington on Waterloo, for instance.

Not everyone is taking this sea change as passively as it may appear. Christiane Amanpour, CNN's chief international correspondent, has complained publicly about the Pentagon's use of "public relations techniques" to prevent reporters from having access to the war. She said the Pentagon's strict control over the story had resulted in a lot of "super-patriotism and hyper-emotive" coverage.

Does it matter? Does it matter that Tony Blair misled us about the progress of the war? Well, in 1999 a group of American congressmen travelled to Yugoslavia because they felt that they could trust neither their own government nor their media to tell them what was really going on. Have we now reached a stage in Britain when we can trust neither the media (through no fault of the best of it) nor our government, to tell us what is really happening in Afghanistan?

Phillip Knightley is author of The First Casualty, a history of war reporting and propaganda.