Julie Flint: All this moral posturing won't help Darfur

July was a pretty typical month in the fifth year of the war in Darfur. In the bloodiest reported incident, 16 people died in fighting between two Arab tribes armed by Khartoum to fight the rebels. An attack by an Arab militia on a government police force killed another eight people. "Unidentified" militias attacked government soldiers and police, villagers and displaced people, relief workers and convoys.

This is not the "genocide" the Prime Minister spoke of in his speech to the Labour Party conference. There is still massive displacement in Darfur - 160,000 people already this year - but the Darfur of 2007 is not the Darfur of 2003-4, when President Omar el Bashir attempted to crush a rebellion in one of Sudan's most neglected peripheries with lethal and indiscriminate force.

In those days, thousands of civilians died, week after week and month after month. Today, UN officials estimate that violent deaths have declined to about 200 a month, including, perhaps, a dozen killed by aerial bombardment this year. Mortality levels among those reached by relief are marginally better than they were before the war and, remarkably, lower than they are in the suburbs of Khartoum. Darfur today is far more akin to Chad or Somalia than it is to Rwanda or Bosnia. The conflict is, as tribal leaders warned before rebel negotiators rejected the Darfur Peace Agreement last year, "a war of all against all".

Gordon Brown's emphasis on Darfur, in close co-operation with the French President Nicolas Sarkozy, has much to recommend it, especially if the Prime Minister harnesses Sarkozy's energies and Chadian connections and directs them towards engagement with Khartoum, away from the interventionist agenda Sarkozy initially espoused.

But more important will be the extent to which Brown is able to convince President George Bush to look for a long-term solution to the conflict in Darfur - and the wider Sudan - and to refuse to play to a gallery whose obsession with "genocide" has diverted attention from work towards a settlement.

Under Tony Blair, No 10 trod a path made in America. It overruled the Foreign Office time and again and almost always to detriment, demanding troops for Darfur and a no-fly zone, rather than support for the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which ended the war in the south and emphasis on a ceasefire.

It is unclear whether Brown, who made special mention of Darfur in his press conference with President Bush yesterday, will plough a new furrow, or whether, as some fear, the price of distancing himself from US policy on big issues such as Iraq and climate change will be surrender on what he sees as high-profile, low-impact ones such as Darfur. Britain's new interest in Darfur comes at a difficult, and possibly decisive, political moment. Sudan is making clear it rejects, and will continue to reject, a Chapter VII mandate that would allow UN peacekeepers to use "all necessary means" to protect civilians.

The emphasis on getting UN peacekeepers into Darfur has bedevilled western policy for the past two years, driven largely by an interventionist lobby whose backing in the US Congress has intimidated the State Department and hindered any rational approach to Sudan. Overshadowed by the blinding focus on Darfur, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended the civil war in South Sudan is withering.

The CPA, painstakingly and patiently negotiated in a way that the DPA was not, provides a framework for a Sudan at peace, with good governance and free elections. If it collapses, the North-South war, longer and bloodier than Darfur's, will resume and Darfur will once again be what it was when the world first looked away: a sideshow.

George Bush's megaphone diplomacy has resulted in a complete breakdown of communication with Khartoum, the root of Darfur's problem. The first thing the Prime Minister must do is establish a strong working relationship with Khartoum. He must make clear exactly what is demanded of it. Pressure will work only if there is clarity. This means not doing what Bush did: announce sanctions a day after Khartoum agreed to a "heavy support package" for UN troops.

The second thing is to understand what UN troops can, and cannot, do in Darfur. They can protect the camps, escort women to gather firewood and help people return to their villages. They cannot end the war or disarm the Janjaweed. The third thing is to tailor a peace process that fits the circumstances of today, not yesterday: to identify rebel commanders who have support in the field, as opposed to in neighbouring capitals with agendas of their own, and to open the process to a range of Darfurians.

Khartoum has not achieved its war aims. It has not crushed the rebellion. It has not formed an alliance with the Fur, Darfur's largest tribe, to carry it to victory in elections in 2009. But it has what is surely, in its opinion, the next best thing: a Darfur that is disintegrating, driving ever more Darfurians to camps and shantytowns where they will be the dispossessed underclass of the next generation.

The Prime Minister's choice is clear. He can be a strategist who is more concerned with solutions than managing the political pressure from the US. Or he can be a populist, more concerned with labels than outcomes. There is no third way.

The writer is co-author, with Alex de Waal, of Darfur: A Short History of a Long War