David Aaronovitch: Necessary bloodshed

'What would have happened had the knowledge of unpunished terrorism spread?'

Special report

The shadow of terror: Three months on

I get no kick from campaign. There is nothing in the business of war that delights me, not the uniforms, the maps with arrows or the descriptions of the extraordinary powers of modern munitions. War is staring eyes in dead young faces, amputations, the quick ruin of things that took ages to build or cultivate. As the towers collapsed on 11 September, contemplating what would happen next, my first thought was of what the 16th-century Humanist, Erasmus, had said about war; that there was nearly no peace – however bad – that wasn't better than almost any war. He sets the hurdle high.

Nevertheless, I have supported the military actions by the coalition (or rather, the United States plus) in Afghanistan. But there have been moments in the last three months when this support has become almost intolerable; when it has seemed that the goals of the campaign, however desirable or urgent, would be more than offset by the misery, suffering and resentment that it helped cause.

Shortly after the first missile and bomb strikes on targets in Afghanistan, several of the aid agencies which operate in the area issued a call for a bombing pause. Winter was on the way, they said, and shortly the passes would close. There was a window during which aid could be delivered to some parts of Afghanistan, and if this window were made smaller and narrower by military action, then hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Afghans would die. One figure given was four million.

If this were true, then – despite the fact that the conflict could be ended quickly by the handing over of Osama bin Laden by the Taliban – it would be impossible to justify the continuation of the bombing. The scale of human loss would, to say the least, be disproportionate to the objectives of the campaign.

A poll published in The Guardian suggested a majority of respondents were in favour of such a pause. But the World Food Programme did not believe it to be true, and neither did the Development Secretary, Clare Short. And my experience of dealing with agencies and pressure groups led me to wonder whether these predictions weren't worst-case-possible estimates of the kind that are designed to capture the imagination. Assuming this to be the case, might not the suffering in Afghanistan actually be prolonged by allowing the Taliban and bin Laden to regroup, and also by demoralising those Afghan forces who opposed them?

Then there was undoubted power behind the argument that intervention might lead to incredible unrest in other Muslim countries, and to the creation of a huge new reservoir of would-be suicide bombers. Before a single cruise missile had described its familiar half-corkscrew and low-parabola over the Indian Ocean, BBC reporters were appearing on camera, framed by street scenes from Quetta, Peshawar and Islamabad. Reports came in from Indonesia. Strange young men appeared outside mosques in Luton, waving placards in support of bin Laden. There were stories of "hundreds" of British Muslims taking the Talib trail to Kabul. If this were true, then once again the price of action would be greater than any benefit.

Some of the early accounts of American bombing, especially from the front line in the Panjshir valley, remarked upon the accuracy of the air strikes. For a short while the elusive grail of the munition that only kills bad guys seemed within reach again. As the war went on, however, the inevitable happened. We found out about villages, mistaken for Taliban outposts or training camps, where in single sorties dozens of civilians would be killed where they slept. There were pictures of the perfect corpses of babies, whitened from the dust of their homes, laid out. There is no agreement about civilian casualties. What work has been done, essentially by compiling and cross-referencing press reports (most of which will have had the same original source), has been too partisan and unreliable so far. But it is not at all impossible that the final figure will be greater than that of the number of casualties of the 11 September atrocities. At what point, I had to ask myself, did this suffering become disproportionate?

And there was the brutality of it all, exemplified by the "prisoners' revolt" in the Qala fort near Mazar-I-Sharif. Even if this wasn't the mass shooting of bound prisoners that some people (who weren't there) claimed, it was still suggestive that we were becoming desensitised to violence of an almost unimaginable savagery.

As I write this, bin Laden has not been found, despite the price on his head. I think it is a matter of time, but I have no idea how long. In the meantime I listen to some of the noises coming out of Washington, to the right side of President Bush, and hear strains of a dangerous triumphalism. As though some of them believe that it's all easy again now, that bomb-and-go is a strategy with a future. And I feel that, if these voices are to become the loudest in the White House, then I will have been backing the wrong horse.

These, then, were – and are – the doubts. The consequences of a course of action that I have supported have included the deaths of innocents who had done me no harm, save unwillingly harbouring an organisation of religious fanatics. And the global outcome of this action is not at all clear. What else, though, could I have supported? Could we have left it all alone? Merely increased security? Imposed sanctions on somebody for a bit? If so, what on who? Tried even harder to infiltrate al-Qa'ida? Offered Mullah Omar some incredible bribe to betray bin Laden to the West?

The question that those opposed to the war seem never to be willing to pose, let alone answer, is what would have happened had the knowledge of an unpunished and spectacular terrorism spread. Is it not far more likely that the regimes of the Arab world would fall to fundamentalism if no action were taken? Did we not, as a matter in the first instance of simple self-defence, have to destroy al-Qa'ida? In other words, what would their death toll have looked like?

Here's a long quote for you, by way of illustration. This is from the statement by Osama bin Laden given to Al-Jazira television on 7 October: "Here is America struck by God almighty in one of its vital organs, so that its greatest buildings are destroyed. Grace and gratitude to God. America has been filled with horror from north to south and east to west, and thanks be to God that what America is tasting is only a copy of what we have tasted... God has blessed a group of vanguard Muslims, the forefront of Islam, to destroy America. May God bless them and allot them a supreme place in heaven. For he is the only one capable and entitled to do so."

In the recent history of mad insurgencies, only the millennial rantings of the Sendero Luminoso in Peru match this for insanity. Those people who still argue that there are doubts over the authorship of the 11 September attacks are either in severe denial, or else have peculiar agendas of their own. And if 11 September was regarded as a great success, we must presume that the same people would try to repeat this feat as often and as spectacularly as possible. Or at least, until all foreigners quit the Arabian peninsula, all Jews left Jerusalem and the Indians departed from Kashmir. At which point, even if these outcomes were imaginable, we could expect other groups with other demands to learn the great lesson of bin Laden: that madness pays.

Action there had to be. And one of the major tasks of America's allies, and of Britain in particular, was to stay close to America, to enfold it within a coalition where strategy was discussed. Not, though, for all the complaints of the hawks, a coalition to prevent a successful offensive against al-Qa'ida.

There has been nothing illegal about the military campaign. The UN Security Council Resolution 1328 of 12 September reaffirmed the rights of states to take action in self-defence, in a context where the only possible meaning was to give the US permission to use force against al-Qa'ida. For all the yelling, most fair-minded people would now accept that bin Laden has been proved to be one of the main people running Taliban Afghanistan, that he was planning further atrocity operations from that country, and that there was as much chance of his extradition to face trial as of snowmen dancing on the surface of the sun.

Bin Laden's suicide bombers did not come from the ranks of the dispossessed, but from the heart of the Arab bourgeoisie. What motivated them was not desperation, but humiliation. I tend to agree with the analysis in Professor Fred Halliday's recent excellent book, Two Hours That Shook The World (published by Saqi Books), that the long-term reason for the attack, and reason why there was support for it in parts of the Muslim world, lies in the poisonous legacies of colonialism, the Cold War and the terrible failure of secular Arab governments. To lay all this, as some have, almost entirely at the feet of the United States is crudely reductionist.

For several weeks after the hijackings, too many of us fell for the myth of the monolithic Muslim world, or the idea of the walk-on army of the dispossessed. The insurrections in Pakistan, for example, confidently predicted, have so far failed to happen. Bin Laden's much-lauded clever use of PR (remember that?) turned into the video from hell, and his smiling boasts of the chaos and death that he had created. And if this was a "war on Muslims", then how come the ground part was being fought almost entirely by Muslims?

The bloodthirsty warlords have turned out – so far – not to be quite as bloodthirsty as feared. There were not mass executions in Kabul and – as of today – I am not aware of large-scale atrocities anywhere else. Furious tribesmen did not congregate in the capital – instead, traffic policemen in white gloves took to the streets. The cinema reopened. Some women felt bold enough to let their faces be seen. But these are early days, and the new government has hardly been formed. A lot could go wrong. There won't, though, be hundreds of thousands of Afghans dying in a famine, and it would be interesting to hear some aid agencies explain this in the weeks to come.

Meanwhile, there is a huge job to be done of helping in the reconstruction of a nation. Tony Blair promised that as much effort would go into establishing peace and security for the ordinary Afghans, as went into destroying the main part of al-Qa'ida. And it is by these efforts, and efforts to establish the new world order that he spoke about, that I will judge whether or not I was right to support military action. Progressives ought to take Blair at his word. The fierce debate on the Tanzanian air-traffic control system (a debate that would have received no coverage five years ago) is a hopeful sign here.

Of course, sections of the right already want to peel off. It was significant that Iain Duncan Smith's first major point of difference with the Government has come over the deployment of UK troops as part of an international peace-keeping effort. The war he was happy about. But he, as well as some of the US hawks, say that they are not into "nation-building". In which case we would, if we took his advice, be doomed to repeat the same errors that helped to put us here in the first place. Then the lives of people in two continents really would have been wasted. And – important only to me – I would have been wrong.