When war breaks out, who is a legitimate target? The near universal revulsion at the attack on civilians in the World Trade Centre shows that they were not a legitimate target-even for those who oppose US power. With the shift of the conflict to Afghanistan, the question of who can be attacked has become central to the legitimacy of the campaign against terrorism. Once again, we are seeing a shrinkage in the circle of legitimate targets-something which has been a feature of western rhetoric and military policy since the end of the cold war. Indeed, the idea that in war, people and their governments should be treated separately, has become something of a western fetish. In the war against Iraq, great efforts were made to avoid civilian casualties. Similarly, the air war against Serbia targeted the Milosevic regime. The contrast with the attitude of the Serbian and Iraqi militaries towards their enemy populations, or indeed the Russians towards Chechnya, is striking.

For the west, sparing civilians in war-as required by the western-inspired Geneva Conventions-is a way of establishing itself as civilised. But this western restraint contrasts with its behaviour during the second world war and the cold war. During these total wars, less effort was made to draw distinctions between people and states. In the second world war, both sides carpet-bombed each other’s cities. No clearer statement of the linkage between state and people could be made than the nuclear incinerations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The cold war was more nuanced in its rhetoric but much the same in its practice. The west made communism the enemy, rather than the Russian or Chinese people, but the missiles would have obliterated their cities just the same.

The truth is that drawing a civilian-military distinction is problematic. In all-out war, the home front (production, logistics, conscription) is as much part of the conflict as the fighting front. In Vietnam, as in all guerrilla wars, the dilemma of who to target was particularly acute. The whole point of guerrilla war-as Mao said-is to blend fighters into a supportive population. This “blending in” applies also to terrorist groups like al Qaida who hide in and draw support from civilian populations. Where the state is weak the distinction between the military and civilians can disappear. In the tribal wars of Sierra Leone and Congo, or the clan wars of Somalia and Afghanistan, who is a soldier and who a civilian? To understand wars, whether to fight them or to resolve them, it is vital to appreciate that they are conducted not just between groups of fighters, but between these groups and their support networks.

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