I'm hanging about on the main street in Lipljan, in Kosovo. It's booming - literally, as the bass from half a dozen sound systems pumps out Albanian pop music. The cameraman is filming the Gurkhas prowling up and down, tight as the coiled springs of clockwork tigers. I can't help but be impressed - these guys come as advertised: small but fierce. In a parody of every second world war film, a young man with a plum in his mouth and a firm handshake introduces himself: "Hello. Captain Corcoran - call me Corky."

Supper with the Gurkhas was excellent - curry, as they generically call it, served from plastic tubs, on a trestle table under a canvas roof. Conversation turned to the unsolved mystery of the air campaign - just how many Serb tanks did the allied bombers hit? Nato told us it was in the hundreds, but journalists in Kosovo have spotted fewer than a dozen wrecks. I said that we always assumed it was fewer than Nato said, but didn't know how many fewer. The commanding officer looked at me, wide-eyed. "Didn't you believe Nato?" he asked, clearly amazed that I might not.

"Of course I didn't," I said, equally amazed that anyone might think I would.

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I suppose he's a soldier because he's the kind of person who tends to believe authority and I'm a journalist because my instincts tell me to question people in power. I did, however, quite take to the King of Peya. He's not a real king, but a UN bureaucrat by the name of Alain le Roy who says he rules this ruined town. The pretender to the throne is Ethem Ceku, a rotund former policeman and lately a Kosovo Liberation Army commander, a private potentate ruling his own parallel domain. The situation has arisen because that amorphous creature "the international community" decreed that the UN - headed by the French politician Bernard Kouchener - should govern Kosovo until elections took place. The UN has lived down to expectations and dithered so much that the KLA stepped into the breach.

"Monsieur Kouchener 'as total powaire, and I am 'is representative in Peya," says le Roy, who speaks with an exemplary French accent. He tells me enthusiastically that he "never 'ad so much powaire before".

"I was here before le Roy," counters Ceku, petulantly. But le Roy plans to be a benign monarch. When he appoints local administrators, he's likely to choose those who have already chosen themselves. So if he and Ceku can agree on who wears the crown, there's little danger of regicide.

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This was, our Prime Minister told us, a humanitarian war, and after the soldiers, along came Kosovo's colonisers, the humanitarians. My list from the Inter-Agency Co-ordination Unit (IACU) reveals no fewer than 159 aid agencies, each with its own acronym, from AAH - not a sigh of donor fatigue but a truncation of Action Against Hunger - to WAMY, which is neither single nor double but stands for the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. Casting my eye down the list, I note that two agencies appear to be run by the same F Nazi. Apparently, last month the UN in Kosovo bought up western Europe's entire consignment of white Toyota Landcruisers, the vehicle of choice for aid agencies worldwide. From the des-res NGO highlands of Dragodan to the razor-wire-fringed Whitehall of Pristina, the traffic jam is worthy of the Essex Road. No wonder a friend of mine who works for the UN has retreated to Somalia for a bit of peace.

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From Pristina to Belgrade to Budapest to London. On the train to Scotland for the Edinburgh Television Festival, I reflect on all this, as we are to debate: "Kosovo - did television have a good war?" What bothers me is that television - and the media in general - swallowed the government's line that the war was fought for human rights. The refugees not only were the most readily available story but also made the best pictures, so that was the tale we told most often. I worry about saying this, because it lays me open to the accusation that I don't care what happened to the Albanians. On the contrary. But we should have been able to express outrage at Serbian atrocities without losing the ability to question our government's motives.

Only after the war started did details of the agreement that the Serbs refused to sign at Paris come out. One clause said Nato troops would have the right to go anywhere they wanted in the former republic of Yugoslavia. Anywhere? Such as Belgrade? Well, yes, apparently. No wonder Slobo didn't sign. It can be argued that that clause made war inevitable - which raises the question of who put it in and why. Caught up in the misery of the Albanian victims, I don't think we questioned our government enough on such essential, but unphotogenic, matters. When they cited human rights, we behaved like the Gurkha commander and believed them.

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It was a spirited debate in Edinburgh, not least when Robert Fisk of the Independent took on Mark Laity, the BBC Nato correspondent during the war, whom he once called "a sheep in sheep's clothing". But I am still preoccupied with the broader question. We liberal journalists who exposed human rights abuses by western-backed regimes in the cold war don't know what to say now the government has stolen our vocabulary. I guess, like Ceku from Peya, we got there first, but they 'ave the powaire.

Lindsey Hilsum is diplomatic correspondent for "Channel 4 News"

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