David Aaronovitch: Not every regrettable killing in Afghanistan is a war crime

'Some people emit outrage like elephants' piss. The sheer quantity soon covers the psychological landscape'

So, as of this week, we have become war criminals. Events at the Qalai Janghi fort, in northern Afghanistan, are to be set alongside the Srebrenica massacre or My Lai. And those in any way implicated – the Northern Alliance, the SAS, the United States Air Force – are to be compared with Ratko Mladic and Lieutenant Calley. All this without an enquiry.

Some people emit outrage like elephants' piss. The sheer quantity of it soon covers the psychological landscape, and more floods out than can ever have gone in. Should you be able to bottle a sample and take it to the lab for analysis, you find ingredients that include the false claim that the media are somehow ignoring the real story (thus creating a secondary outrage to supplement the first); that mentions awkward counter-facts in parentheses or one sentence (as in, "Of course, the Taliban are also bastards, but...") or not at all; that ascribes sentiments to opponents in quotation marks, but without supplying quotes; that draws parallels with an incontinent inexactitude from anywhere or anytime in world history.

Actually the "war criminal" charge is becoming common. If Milosevic (who is responsible since 1990 for scores of thousands of deaths in the former Yugoslavia), then so the Allied bombers who killed between 480 and 530 civilians during the bombing of Serbia. It sometimes seems to me that those who opposed the action in Kosovo, and who oppose the action in Afghanistan now, cannot afford to be wrong again. The chances are that bin Laden – now the undisputed origin of the 11 September conspiracy and de facto co-ruler of Taliban Afghanistan – will be captured or killed soon, his death unattended by revolution in Pakistan or insurrection in Indonesia. So a new legend will have to be constructed, and that will be the story of our complicity in a bloodbath.

What happened at Qalai Janghi? A report in yesterday's New York Times stated: "Members of a German television crew were filming in the fortress where the prisoners were being held when the uprising began on Sunday, and said that the mêlée started as the prisoners were assembling on a parade ground. A prisoner lunged for the weapon of a guard, and five guards were swiftly mowed down."

I recommend this account to one British columnist who, yesterday, appeared to suggest that somehow the local warlord, the notorious General Dostum, had contrived the whole thing for some gory purpose of his own. In any case, a little earlier an ITN reporter was wounded when a Taliban prisoner blew both himself and some of his captors up, using a hidden grenade.

After that it was bloody and chaotic. The ex-prisoners had the fort and a lot of weapons, their enemies had tanks, American planes and SAS spotters. As a reporter in the same paper commented: "The fighters had wanted martyrdom, and, after a four-day battle, almost all of them had got it." At which point, allow me to void my own elephant's bladder a little by pointing out that their choice was far greater than that of the victims of 11 September, who looked back at the flames in the World Trade Centre, and then decided to fall to their deaths.

Next day we got the pictures of bodies, boot-looting and (worst of all) gold-tooth pulling. Who were these barbarians? And had we not become barbarians, too? Perhaps as many as 50 of the bodies may have had their hands bound. "How you treat a captured enemy divides the warrior from the war criminal," said one writer.

But, of course, it doesn't. I reached up, almost at random, for a book off the shelf. I found Max Hastings' The Korean War. In a chapter devoted to the treatment of prisoners, Hastings says this: "When the atmosphere at the front was relaxed, prisoners were properly used... But at periods of special stress or fear... many UN soldiers shot down enemy prisoners – or even civilians – with barely a moment's scruple." He then quotes a Private Warren Avery of the 29th Infantry: "We took no prisoners. Our interpreter, Lieutenant Moon, was always asking for a prisoner, but we never gave him one. Geneva Convention, my ass."

The same may have happened in the Falklands, and certainly Allied troops sometimes shot surrendering prisoners during the First and the Second World Wars. We were, after all, allied to Stalin, the man who ordered the Katyn massacres. Even so what, so far, we know of Qalai Janghi does not sound like a war crime. Had, in 1944, a chateau full of captured SS men killed their captors and then holed up inside shooting at anything that moved, I doubt whether anyone now would have called their extinction a "war crime".

Meanwhile, the much less sexy story of winning the peace was unfolding in Bonn. There were no body parts, no horror stories, not even any ludicrous fantasy pictures of what bin Laden's cave complex in the Tora Bora could look like. At the UN talks on Afghanistan, broad agreement was being reached on the composition of the interim government, and there was even some compromise on the question of peace-keeping forces. Kabul seems to be peaceful and to have been spared the predicted revenge killings, or indeed the once apparently imminent arrival of angry tribesmen from Bamiyan. So far, so good. Oh, and in case you missed it, Bush and Kofi Annan have discussed humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and both stressed its importance. Let's hope Bush means it.

Even so, we need to have an inquiry into what took place at Qalai Janghi. Because, though it's true that terrible things happen in war – and though it's also true that even the most enlightened armies will fail to meet the Arthurian tests hypocritically set for them by some of those who routinely oppose military action by the West – still we must not become callous or inured. It should be, on balance, an advantage in a democracy to be faced with the implications – even in graphic terms – of our actions. It is just as essential (and far more difficult) also to understand the potential consequences of our inaction. So an inquiry, as called for by Amnesty and run by the UN, could tell us a lot about the conduct of war, could dispel (or confirm) the inevitable myths and would be part of a process of accountability and self-examination that ought not to stop for armed conflict.

Besides, there was a more worrying report coming from near Kandahar yesterday. There an anti-Taliban leader appeared to admit that his men had shot 150 captured Taliban, despite pleas from eight US observers that their lives should be spared. That, if true, was certainly a war crime. And we are, to some extent, implicated. We must stop this where we can.

And now for the answer to the correspondent who e-mailed me yesterday – rather triumphantly – to ask me what I had to say about the Afghan mother and child killed by an air-dropped American aid package that crushed their house. This is what I say – it was an accident. An ironic accident, but an accident just the same. An accident like several that will have happened on our roads while I was writing this, and will also have killed mothers and children.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com