From The Seattle PI
By Bidisha Biswas

Fighting the so-called “Global War on Terror” has become the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Are we winning or losing this war?

To answer this question, we have to first try and understand what we mean by terrorism. Terrorism is an intensely contested, value-laden term. Despite several debates, the member states of the United Nations are still unable to agree on even a basic definition.

The public discourse in the United States has shown little hint of these contestations. As late as 2006, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that ” … any kind of moral and intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can severely weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.”

We have been asked, repeatedly, to assume that terrorists are always wrong; those who fight terrorists are always right.

Most experts agree that terrorism is the deliberate use of violence by nonstate actors against civilians for a political reason. Yet, even this definition reveals more questions than answers.

For example, when soldiers are killed in noncombat areas (think of troops that died in the 2005 Bali bombings or the 2000 attack on the USS Cole), is that terrorism or is it war? What happens when state-funded militias kill civilians? Should we distinguish between “just” and “unjust” political goals? There are no easy answers to these questions; but pretending that the questions do not even exist dooms our policies to failure.

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