I think that among the briefing materials given to anyone working to win the war on terror (or terrorism depending on your political persuasion) should be a copy of the film, Battle of Algiers . The film gives an account of the struggle between the French colonial authorities and the Algerian independence movement, the National Liberation Front. It gives an interesting and in-depth perspective both on terrorism and insurgency, and the tactics used against them. One of the most resonant points is reflected in the following exchange between a journalist and a captured Algerian insurgent leader:

Journalist: “M. Ben M'Hidi, don't you think it's a bit cowardly to use women's baskets and handbags to carry explosive devices that kill so many innocent people?”

Ben M'Hidi: “And doesn't it seem to you even more cowardly to drop napalm bombs on defenseless villages, so that there are a thousand times more innocent victims? Of course, if we had your airplanes it would be a lot easier for us. Give us your bombers, and you can have our baskets.”

The question is not whether terrorism is effective. Instead it’s a matter of putting terrorism (and terror) into perspective. Terrorism is a weapon of war, the choice weapon for the militarily weak against the militarily strong. As such, it is effective, or at least raises the costs of engagement. What terrorism is not is an ideology. It has nothing to say about how societies should be governed or how people should live their lives. And therefore it is not something we can defeat. Defeating terrorism is not like defeating communism, but instead like trying to defeat blitzkrieg warfare.

Instead we should consider the language we use and reflect upon who the enemy is. Certainly the enemy is al-Qaeda, but what does it stand for? Even if we consider this group Islamists, Islamism comes in many different forms and cannot in itself be considered the enemy. After all, a democratically-elected Islamist party governs Turkey, and some Islamists in Egypt and other parts of the Muslim world could be considered more democratic than their secular opponents. Alternatively, we could narrowly define the enemy as those who through terrorism would do physical harm to our allies and us. That definition could work, but it doesn’t fit very well into a thirty second sound bite, or onto the footer of CNN or Fox News. Part of the problem may also be that we’re not entirely sure who our enemy is--after all, they’re not really tied to particular countries or to one coherent overarching vision. If you put representatives from Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda into a room and tried to get a coherent and totalizing vision for the world out of them, you’d probably fail. So in the end, from this point of view, we’re left with a much muddier picture of the conflict we’re engaged in around the world but one that more accurately describes the situation than simplistic catch-phrases like the “war on terror.”