As people who are terrified by terrorist attacks often forget, terrorism by a military organization is a purely military tactic. Military tactics have defined goals to which are allocated certain resources. The terrorism is done for a specific end. It is not done for its own sake. To combat it, we need to understand what the end might be, so we don't end up being manipulated by terror, which is the point of terror as a military strategy.
One way to understand how it works is to look at a situation where it did work; an episode when it was an effective military strategy. And one of the most famous in recent years was in 1946, when a Jewish terror attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killed 91 people and changed the nature of the conflict in Palestine.
The operation was carried out by the Zionist military group Irgun, with the approval of the larger Zionist military organization Hagenah. Irgun members, dressed as Arabs, placed about 750 lbs. of explosives hidden in milk cans in the King David Hotel, which at the time was mostly being used as the offices of the British military authority in the Palestinian mandate. There has been controversy over whether effective warnings were given and acted upon. But the attack led to the collapse of much of the southern wing of the hotel and killed 91 people, both military and civilian and both within the hotel and on the street.
The attack was done in part as an attempt to destroy military documents belonging to Irgun that had recently been captured by the British and brought to offices in the hotel. But the effect of the bombing was also to enrage British public opinion while weakening the British Mandate government, who had been telling the British that they had things under control in the Mandate. To try to regain control of the situation, the British shortly later mounted a major military crackdown on the city, locking up about 800 people and making restrictions on the civil liberties of the Jews living there. This in turn led to increased opposition of the Jews there to the British government and made them more sympathetic to and unified around the Zionist movement. By weakening the government, by carrying out a successful military operation, by causing the British people to begin to see the British mandate as a lost cause, and by causing the British to over react in Palestine and unite Jews against them, the Irgun was able to achieve all of the aims of their terrorist strategy and probably hastened the creation of the State of Israel.
The attack was not done because the Zionists hated Christians, or because they hated Western civilization, or even because they hated the British as such. It was not done to promote the Jewish religion over the Christian religion espoused by the British, nor was the intention to inflict a military defeat over the British in order to conquer them. The terrorist attack made sense at the time given the resources that the Zionists had and given the aims that were possible at the time.
What are Radical Islamists aiming for when they perform terrorist acts (or take credit for the terrorist acts of others)? They do have an aim.
One way to figure out what the aim is, is to make an assumption that they are designed to terrorize and then look at what the terrorized people want to do. What the terrorized people are not doing is converting to Islam. They are not suggesting that we convert the West into a caliphate. They are not suggesting that we establish "sharia law". What they are suggesting is that we retaliate against Muslims both directly and indirectly. Directly, by an expansion (perhaps a massive expansion) of the war (although who exactly we are supposed to attack seems vague). Indirectly, they are suggesting that we treat Muslims as separate, and curtail their rights whether or not they are citizens.
When we take these things and then look at what is going on with terrorism in the Middle East, we find that most acts of terror in the world by people calling themselves Muslims are against other Muslims. If there was some sort of "Muslim war of all" against the West, this would not seem to make much sense. But it would make sense if we saw that Muslims are in fact not unified in the way that our terrified Westerners think that they are. And that it may be the case that terrorism in the West has the aim of unifying the West against Muslims in order to unify Muslims against us; in order to discredit Muslims who are either pro-secular or pro-Western; and to mobilize those who are sitting on the fence. In other words, like any good terrorist strategy, what they are trying to do is to manipulate us. And we seem close to falling for it.
Terrorism works when it terrifies. It doesn't when we keep our heads.
