During the cold war, many people felt that the world was on the brink of nuclear annihilation, that a single military or governmental error could send us all to oblivion. This did not restrain political leaders from foreign adventures, but it forced them to calculate, with some precision, the consequences of their actions. Always, the aim was to avoid a direct confrontation between Soviet and American forces. Though Krushchev, in a characteristic moment of bluster, once said he would flatten London and New York, neither side realistically threatened the other's homeland. Each waged war, usually through proxies, in other people's countries.

This is why the atrocities of 11 September take us into a new world, albeit one long predicted. All the familiar calculations of international power politics have been upset. Even if we think we know the identity of the aggressors and their motives, we do not understand how best to damage them or how they would respond if attacked. Worst of all, we have no idea of their strength. Quite possibly, like both sides in the cold war, they have the capacity and the will to threaten annihilation, through biological or chemical as well as nuclear weapons. (It should be noted, however, that 11 September suggests ruthless determination and meticulous planning rather than sophisticated equipment, and that the nastiest enemies tend, as Hitler did in the 1930s, to encourage exaggerated tales of their military capabilities.) Equally possibly, the US hijackings are a one-off spectacular, the scale of which will not be repeated, if at all, for several years.

The truth is that nobody knows how best to respond to the attacks. In this issue, we challenge the anti-war left in Britain to answer the question posed by Harold Evans, former editor of the Sunday Times, and also by Anne McElvoy, the Independent columnist: what would you do? Both claim not to hear an answer. But when bombs and missiles are about to fly, doubt and hesitation are not bad positions. Given so many unknowns, "do nothing" is a legitimate answer, following the Hippocratic principle of "first, do no harm". The risks of killing many innocent people and further inflaming Muslim opinion are enormous. So are the risks of losing a war in a country that neither the British nor the Russians managed to pacify, and even Genghis Khan avoided.

A second, and probably better, answer - and one that, as our US editor reports (page 16), Colin Powell, the American secretary of state, seems to advocate - is to do the minimum. The Taliban, unsurprisingly, are not popular. Support the oppositionist Northern Alliance with money, training, food and arms (though we must hope that the Americans are not here creating another monster that will one day savage them), persuade Pakistan to choke off supplies to the regime, launch commando raids with the specific aim of arresting (not killing) Bin Laden and his closest allies, and the Taliban could well crumble or, less probably, they will hand over Bin Laden and close down the terrorist camps. Equally, they may not, but the consequences of failure in this strategy are likely to be less catastrophic than the consequences of failure in more glamorous strategies.

The third answer is to remove the conditions in which terrorism flourishes. To those who pooh-pooh this idea - on the correct, but irrelevant, grounds that the terrorists themselves are interested in Islamic theocratic dictatorship and not in global inequality or Palestinian misery - it should be pointed out that this is precisely what the British and Americans are doing. In the course of building their anti-terrorist coalition, they have modified support for the Israelis and lifted sanctions on Pakistan. All sorts of foreign aid, debt forgiveness and export opportunities will shortly flow to Muslim countries previously thought too unreliable or too disobedient to the IMF to deserve any of it. Russia, too, can no doubt expect a share of the booty. The cynical could say that, if the attacks on New York and Washington represented a cry of rage from the developing world, it has already started to work. It could even be called appeasement - a word that must bear responsibility for most major post-1945 foreign policy errors, from Suez to Vietnam, and which is utterly irrelevant in the present context since, unlike in the 1930s, we have no idea what we are appeasing.

We know that, particularly with a Republican in the White House, these changes in US policy are temporary. There is no change of heart, just a wish to get back rapidly to business as usual. In any case, much of the aid will be used to prop up corrupt, cruel and authoritarian regimes, stoking more popular Muslim unrest. But at least circumstances have forced the Bush regime to compromise its principles. The challenge for the left, as John Lloyd argues (page 18), is to seize the opportunity and to press further the case for a stronger global governance and stronger restraints on raw capitalism.

The fourth answer is one that the left usually prefers not to give: to improve intelligence and security. This need not involve draconian limits on civil liberties; as Nick Cohen argues (page 24), getting immigration computers to work and ending the preposterous rivalries between security services, which are even worse in the US than here, would help. But the left may nevertheless need to be less fastidious on such proposals as identity cards, which are carried in other EU countries without its citizens feeling that they are being ground under a tyrant's boot. If terrorist acts can be prevented in the first place, the question of bombing poor people will not arise.

Any of these answers, or a combination of them, is a perfectly adequate response to Mr Evans or Ms McElvoy. If troubled further, ask a few questions back. What exactly is the Armada of ships, planes and tanks, now heading to the Indian Ocean, supposed to do? What is this daft idea that, having razed Afghanistan to the ground, the US will somehow govern the country itself under a UN mandate? Since the US says that Bin Laden's network covers more than 50 nations, does it intend to govern them all? Does it want to rule the whole world? Do not sound anti-American, do not rant, do not shout. But say firmly and clearly: what will your way achieve?

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