Prince Harry may have been fighting for real in Afghanistan, but the furore over the media pact of silence has been a phoney war of words with both sides firing blanks.

On one side, the Prince's more bombastic champions have offered no decent defence of the deal. Prince Harry's mission was a shoot-now- broadcast-later PR operation, not a military necessity. Shipping him into the desert for a “secret” photo opportunity is rather different from the secret D-Day invasion. There are surely already too many restrictions on freedom of expression in the UK without volunteering for more.

On the other side, the claim by the shriller critics that this is the thin edge of an Orwellian wedge has missed the target. The exceptional pact surprised many, precisely because it goes against the grain today. Indeed, in our tell-all age of daily leaks, 24-hour multimedia and public cynicism, the wonder is that such a deal lasted longer than ten minutes, never mind ten weeks.

Perhaps most importantly, the Harry carry-on should not be the big story claimed by all sides. While a phoney war rages over these images, there is little serious debate about the real war in Afghanistan. It's not just Prince Harry whose role should be under scrutiny. What good are the other British troops doing there?

Since the US-UK invasion of 2001, the Government's rationale for the war has shifted from pursuing al-Qaeda to stopping the drugs trade or defending Afghanistan's alleged democracy. The Afghan intervention symbolises the lack of clear purpose behind the War on Terror. Those pictures of Prince Harry firing his machinegun into the desert at unseen targets brought to mind Joseph Conrad's description, in Heart of Darkness, of watching a French warship blindly “firing into a Continent” off the African coast.

If the Government's main aim in Afghanistan really is to protect the Prince and his fellow troops, an obvious response might be: then why send him (or them) to war in somebody else's country in the first place? There are other issues that deserve some more serious attention.

Fighting for free speech and defending a free press should be an everyday cause in our illiberal, conformist culture, not reduced to striking radical poses over some one-off images of HRH in a helmet. The role of the monarchy in modern society also requires more serious criticism than petty sniping about what a prince gets up to either in a nightclub or an army tent.

Some of my fellow republicans argue that the Harry carry-on shows that the Prince should never have been allowed to serve in the Army. But the interviews confirm that he is a born soldier. The real problem is that he is also the born third in line to be head of state in supposedly a 21st-century democracy.

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