Winning the war against terrorism

Despite the old adage that generals should never fight wars on two fronts, most wars (in varying degrees) are fought in just such a fashion. Even if the soldiers fighting the flesh and blood campaign are all in the same trench there is always another campaign being fought for the 'hearts and minds' of the folks back home. The current war against terrorism (there have been many) is no exception.
But folks back home have always needed victories to cheer them and ensure their continued support for a war, and there is one different and, perhaps, unique facet of this current war that may make it difficult to achieve any kind of victory, however we may want to define it: Our enemy doesn't exist in any tangible form.
What certainly IS tangible and beyond doubt is that we in the West are under threat. The attacks on the twin towers and on Bali, Madrid and London as well as on numerous western targets around the world are testament to that. We are at war with SOMEONE because someone is certainly at war with us.


However, our mysterious enemy is not obliging us by arranging his forces in serried ranks on a battlefield, at one under a flag. He knows no borders; He has no nationality (those who bombed the twin towers, Bali, Madrid and London were Saudi, Indonesian, Moroccan and British respectively) and he has no political requirements or demands. He simply wants our complete destruction. Whether that wish is a fanciful delusion remains to be seen but what is certain is that his weapon is terror and his banner is Islam.
Yet we are not at war with the Islamic World because most people in the Islamic World have no wish to be at war with US. It's a complex puzzle, frustrating and unsettling.
But why should our task be so complex? Terrorism, Guerrilla wars and insurgencies have been around for a long time; the Romans, 2,000 years ago, would wearily attest to that. But the guerrilla campaigns in the history books were almost exclusively about territory or political ideology. What our bygone terrorists/freedom fighters (depending on which side you were on) were saying was either "Get your colonial ass off our land" or "Get your communist/fascist ass out of the Presidential Palace".
The campaigns of old could be (and still are) brutal and prolonged but they were comprehensible. It was simply a matter of taking sides. We knew our enemies and we knew what they wanted.
This war on terror is a different matter. Our enemy is an irrational abstract, invisible and diaphanous. We can't really fight him with the weapons we have to hand so we do what humans have always done with abstracts: We replace them with symbols. That way we have something tangible to hold on to and to deal with, something to comprehend. The symbol we have created to replace our abstract enemy is: "Al Qaeda".
Whether it's a plot foiled in London or an atrocity committed in Baghdad the culprit will always be the same: "Al Qaeda". Our media love the term. It is a term that saves us from thinking about complexity and cause. It is a term that provokes the right images in our minds. It is a term that makes some sort of sense of our enemy. Yet it is a nonsense term and until we address the reality behind it we will simply be like Don Quixote tilting at windmills.
But the reality is bewildering. It is a matter of history, economic hardship, frustration, hopelessness, paranoia, jealousy and good old-fashioned angst. It is a matter of Saudi wealth and poverty in the back streets of Cairo. It is a matter of jobless young men in Morocco forced to seek money in a Europe they detest. It is a matter of young British Muslims unable to see a future in what they see as an alien and hostile society. It is a matter of all these things and much, much more.
What is also true is that those who have decided to fight the West are as guilty of replacing their complex (and very human) motivations with symbols as we are our fears. "Jihad" is perhaps as much a fantasy as the modern-day SPECTRE that is "Al Qaida". How much more easy it is to die for "Jihad" than it is to pointlessly throw away your life because of hopelessness and hatred.
Any victory in this war against terrorism will only come about when we are forced to face up to the fact that a significant amount of young Muslims blame us in the West for their problems. A victory will also only come about when the Islamic World takes a long, hard look at itself and faces up to its own shortcomings and stops blaming the "Great Satan" for its own ills. That victory is a long way off and the road to it seems endless.