War on Terrorists

Since ancient times it has been the practice of institutions to demonise the enemy. They then can play on our primitive fear feelings and the need to protect our wife and children from molestation, to justify their actions against this terrible enemy. This primitive fear response supplants any normal rationale or questioning, so the enemy are all equally evil and we don't pause to consider whether all individuals are the same, whether there may be other moderate or conservative opinions and we certainly don't empathise with vulnerable groups within that enemy stronghold.
So currently our diffused enemy we are told are vaguely the Taliban or Al Qaeda or Afghanistan with Pakistan thrown in for reserve or Usama Bin Laden or any mix or combination depending on the latest news. These terrorist put all our lives and families we care about at risk. So we are at war with these evil people.
Trouble is there isn't a hilltop, or a flag, or a strategic place or a town, river crossing, or army front line or airport or harbour that we can capture and say , yeah, we beat them. We have won. There is no identi-kit terrorist that you can instantly recognise by their speech, clothes, hairstyle, colour of skin as unambiguous give-aways. We live in diffused societies and no long, (for a very long time) do we live among kin that we know, recognise and can relate to. Praise be for the diversity it brings but the downside is our enemy is no longer definable.
Worse our enemy is now ideological. So that person sharing the seat on the bus, or on the train or that car coming towards you, may now be an ideological terrorist.
Institutions ascribe authority, control and technical competence to their actions which we, having or chosen to follow their lead, are happy to accept without too much questioning. So we accept the calm assertions that the State's surveillance, intelligence gathering, law enforcement and containment measures are more than adequate to curb any rogue terrorists cells that may exists within our communities, all we have to do is to grant even more extraordinary powers so they can get the job done.
No.
Because their competence is an illusion only matched by the bungling stupidity of those 'artful' terrorists we are told to live in fear of.
No
Because the only way to answer the ideology gap is by demonstrating, day to day, that democracy works, that free-speech is vital and that the State trusts and respects its citizens.
No
Because the only successful attack that can be made on terrorists and terrorism is for each one of us to engage and talk with that neighbour we are sharing space and time with. Not the State, not by more surveillance or more body checks, only by talking directly with them will we get to discover their extremists views.
Only by engaging in non-confrontational dialogue can we get them to expose and recognise for themselves the inadequacies of their ideology and by engagement can we hope to persuade them that there are real alternate strategies to achieve their goals.
That is the only hope for beating the terrorists that lives within us.