Libya: This is only the first step along an unpredictable and hazardous road

On 14 April 1999, at the height of the Nato intervention to prevent Slobodan Milosevic from brutalising the people of Kosovo, American pilots spotted what that they took to be a column of Serbian paramilitaries moving down a road. The airmen's error was understandable: video from the gunsight monitors later revealed that the vehicles could easily be mistaken for military trucks from the cockpit of an F-16 flying at screaming speed at an altitude of 15,000 feet. The pilots went for the kill. What they hit was not Serbian forces, but a convoy of tractors hauling trailers packed with refugees. By the time the onslaught was over, the warplanes had killed at least 70 of the civilians that they had been sent to protect.

That was one of several unintended tragedies in the prosecution of an earlier intervention to stop a dictator from taking his bloody revenge on those who had risen up against him. In the end, the Serb forces were driven out of Kosovo, ethnic cleansing was prevented and Slobodan Milosevic was subsequently put on trial at the Hague for war crimes.

But the eventual outcome makes people liable to forget that there were some very bleak stretches during that intervention and many times when politicians and pundits pronounced that it was a terrible failure. During those dark days, critics were clamorous while faint-hearted supporters flaked away. The international coalition formed for that intervention almost fell apart. The prime minister was attacked as a jejune who had blundered into an utterly misconceived conflict. For a while, some around Tony Blair even thought it might cost him his premiership.

As David Cameron commits to his first war, I cite Kosovo not to suggest that it is wrong to act in Libya. I supported the Kosovo intervention. I argued here last week that there is a compelling moral case and one of national interest for taking action in Libya. I recall Kosovo as an example of how military intervention is always freighted with risks, international coalitions are hard to sustain beyond the initial euphoria when they are first assembled, and a military plan almost never survives unaltered after first contact with the enemy. Declaring an intervention is only the first step along a highly hazardous road; the really tough test is bringing it to a successful conclusion.

At the moment, we are only at the opening, relatively easy, chapter of intervention in Libya. This is the acclamatory phase. Public opinion is broadly behind confronting Colonel Gaddafi. So are most of the media. As are the senior voices of the mainstream political parties. This domestic consensus reflects the international one. It was impressive that the United Nations Security Council voted for intervention by 10 votes to nil with 5 abstentions. This was a feat which redounds to the credit of the British diplomats involved in the effort. It was very important that the resolution was co-sponsored by Lebanon, an Arab state, and backed by all three of the African countries on the Security Council. It was significant that the Russians and the Chinese did not wield their vetoes. For the first time, Beijing and Moscow have accepted that it can be legitimate to make protective interventions against tyrannies, an important precedent.

This display of international solidarity has been of great assistance to David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband, all of whom feel the need to demonstrate that intervening in Libya is a very different proposition from the invasion of Iraq. That was a repeated leitmotif of Mr Cameron's speech to MPs on Friday and of his statements since. He has stressed the regional support for action among Arab states and the legal base provided by the UN resolution. He pointedly told MPs that the attorney-general had advised the cabinet and that counsel had been discussed by ministers – another way of saying this was not Iraq, accompanied by an unsubtle dig at the way in which Tony Blair marched a compliant cabinet to war against Saddam without a proper debate on the legal basis for action.

At this early stage, Mr Cameron has earned some deserved praise for his handling of the first major foreign policy crisis of his premiership. After his Commons statement, Conservative MPs saluted their leader. Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne sat on the front bench, nodding approvingly. A Lib Dem member of the cabinet says proudly: "We have taken as forward a position as the Conservatives. We have argued the same way Paddy Ashdown did over Kosovo. To stand aside in this sort of situation would have been unconscionable." Iraq has left deep and still not entirely healed wounds in the Labour party. It would have been less risky for Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, to sit on the sidelines. So they deserve some credit too for putting Labour on the right side when a fascistic dictator threatens slaughter on his own people. Mr Cameron will get a resounding endorsement for his position when MPs vote tomorrow. That will provide some political air cover as the acclamatory phase turns into the much more hazardous implementation phase. He is likely to discover nevertheless how fickle the public, the media and other politicians can be. Some of those who laud him now will be only too quick to lambast him when things don't go to plan, as they almost certainly won't.

We will see whether Arab support and participation has depth or is a brittle fig leaf that will soon fall away. The Security Council resolution mandates the use of "all necessary measures" to protect civilians, which is robust and comprehensive by UN standards, and yet still open to multiple interpretations of what this legitimises the coalition to do.

At the heart of the perils ahead stands Colonel Gaddafi, the great survivor among tyrants. He may be mad, but that doesn't mean he is entirely stupid. He initially responded to the resolution in the way that any averagely crafty dictator might react when he found himself friendless at the UN and confronted by military powers far superior to his own. He declared a ceasefire as if he had suddenly become a reformed character who would not hurt a hair on a civilian's head. We can be justified in regarding that possibility as being about as likely as discovering that Elvis Presley is alive and well living in the stomach of the Loch Ness monster. Gaddafi is simply adjusting tactics in the face of force majeure.

Continuing attacks on rebel cities yesterday gave the lie to the ceasefire declaration. Even if he does desist from using his mercenaries and heavy weaponry, he will continue to attempt a slow strangulation of Benghazi and the other cities in the rebel east of the country while continuing a vicious suppression of the forces of freedom in Tripoli and other cities in the west. We can expect him to try to reinvent himself from oppressor of his people into victim of western aggression. It is a pretty good bet that he is moving military assets next to hospitals and schools, and planning to use Libyan civilians as human shields for himself and his cronies. He will want to make civilian deaths look like the fault of the west and hope to persuade opinion, especially in the Arab world, that this intervention is not an act of humanity but a war of colonial domination.

The allies will have to conduct operations with extreme care to try to avoid military blunders that will hand him potential propaganda coups. That necessity to act with great precision contends with an imperative to move swiftly. The next few days may prove critical in applying psychological pressure to convince those forces still fighting for Gaddafi to peel away. The longer he has to dig in, the greater the danger that we will end up with a stalemate. Here there is a parallel with Iraq. A no-fly zone was imposed on Saddam Hussein at the end of the first Gulf War in 1990 and Iraq was quasi-partitioned when the west gave special protection to the Kurds in the north. You may remember – I am sure Gaddafi does – that Saddam Hussein nevertheless continued to rule in Baghdad for a further 13 years.

Barack Obama, David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and others have explicitly declared that Gaddafi has to be removed from power if Libya is to have a chance of a future free from tyranny. They are right. It would be a dismal outcome to end up policing a partition: a free eastern Libya while he continues to terrorise the western half of the country. We would be left with a pariah, highly dangerous Gaddafi regime on the southern borders of Europe. The people of Libya will never be truly safe from him until he no longer has the power to do them harm. The logic of the position taken by David Cameron is that this crisis will not be resolved until Gaddafi is gone. But the resolution does not authorise regime change and Nick Clegg felt he needed to remind some of his colleagues of that when the cabinet discussed it on Friday morning.

So the end point of this intervention is uncertain, the enterprise is pregnant with perils, the durability of both domestic support and the international coalition has yet to be tested in the crucible of conflict. The cause is just, but the worst error anyone can make is to imagine that it is likely to be smooth, simple or easy.