It is said that the first casualty of war is truth. It was, in fact, the Sun's page three girl. The general rule appears to be: when our boys are about to go in, our girl goes back. From the moment the bombs started to rain down on Afghanistan, she was retired from the front line, fighting her way forward briefly a week later, only to end up on page 13 last Monday. She has become the national barometer of the intensity of this war.

By Tuesday, she was back on page three; and where the Sun leads, others follow. Both the Times and the Telegraph returned to non-war news on page three this week (the Mail already had), perhaps reflecting the growing fear starting to spread through news-paper offices that decent, hard-working, patriotic Brits are suffering from combat fatigue. I feel like a traitor just suggesting it.

The first to fall were the women readers.

For some time now, I have had a growing suspicion that I was not alone in my reading habits - scan the front page, search for the "war digest", then flick as quickly as possible through the coverage of the crisis.

So I embarked upon the kind of scientific poll tolerated only in columns such as these - I rang all my girlfriends, then got on the Tube and watched how people read their newspapers. Beneath the conspiracy of silence, there is growing disquiet among women about the amount of space being given over to the war. The sight of another graphic with menacing arrows and mock explosions superimposed on a map of Afghanistan with Wessex Saker light strike vehicles, AC-130s, 5.56mm M-249s and Nightstalker helicopters is enough to send most of us screaming into the night. War, it is said, separates the men from the boys. What this war has done, in newspaper terms, is to separate the men from the women.

And can you blame us, when we know that so much of the coverage is nothing but speculation? As Phillip Knightley wrote in the Daily Mail, the Americans have learnt at least one lesson from Vietnam: information is power. But if this is an undercover war, where George Bush and Tony Blair have decided that zero tolerance will be matched with almost zero information, how is it that our newspapers continue to be so full of it?

Every poll of the British people's support for war, from Kosovo to Afghanistan, shows that men's enthusiasm outweighs women's by about two to one. Luckily for the press, this testosterone excitement has translated into an unquenchable thirst for news - there were huge increases in sales on the back of 11 September. The Guardian's sales rose from 390,041 before the attacks to 442,454 in the weeks since. The Sun's sales rose a mere 10,000 in the same period, but the Daily Mail added more than 50,000 readers. Yet the press should consider the commercial implications of this situation - as any advertiser will point out, you alienate your female readers at your peril.

Last Monday's Guardian leader said that the three "Ds" of the US approach to this war are detachment (of Taliban territory by force), defection (simple change of allegiance) and decapitation (killing or capturing leaders). If the newspaper groups do not act quickly, they will have achieved their own three-D strategy. Women readers have already become detached, they will defect and the only thing decapitated will be the newspapers' profits.

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I do not buy the argument that there is no other news around. Entering the casualty unit at the Royal Free Hospital on Sunday with a friend who was ill, I was reminded of a similar moment three years ago, also a Sunday. I was running on Hampstead Heath when I noticed a group of people surrounding a fragile, elderly lady. She was cut from head to toe - having suffered a terrible fall. Everyone just stood around doing nothing, so I told her to wait five minutes while I got my car. I drove her to the hospital and stayed with her as she waited in the casualty unit. We waited for seven hours. Last weekend, my friend had to wait 11 hours. Some progress.

A couple of weeks ago, I vaguely remember reading, way back in the no-man's land that has become home news, that waiting lists in the health service were up again for the fifth month in succession. Yet the Health Secretary, Alan Milburn, pleaded on On the Record not only for more money, which most of us are happy to give, but for more time, which this country's health service does not have.

No one is denying that the war on terrorism is vital; but so is the battle with our failing public services. As the weeks go by, it becomes increasingly clear that Blair and his government intend to use this war as the biggest smokescreen in the history of British politics. Taxes up, public services down, will be Blair's legacy.

The media should not let him get away with it: one of the roles they have played superbly over the past six years, in the absence of a credible Conservative Party, is that of opposition to the new Labour government. This war must not be allowed to become an excuse for failure at home.

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The most absurd moment of the war in the past week came when newspapers reported the "Gosh, it's a woman in a man's job" story of Mumbles, the top gun raised in Surrey who is now bombing in Afghanistan. After running pictures of Ashley from childhood to fighter pilot, describing the school and university she attended, and naming her parents, we were told that the 26-year-old woman's surname could not be revealed - "for security reasons".

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