But anyone who looks at the threat posed by terrorism - in its current manifestation; terrorism as a tactic is almost as old as human conflict - to the West and to civilized life in general, and the way the U.S. government has responded, is likely to come away with an uneasy feeling.

The great, perhaps legendary, ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu warned that "one who does not know the enemy ... will be in danger in every battle." The kind of knowledge Sun Tzu urged goes well beyond the simple categories of "good" (our side) and "evil" (those who oppose or frustrate us) that President Bush is fond of invoking.

At some point soon we will have to distinguish among Muslims who pose a genuine threat, Muslims who pose little or no threat and Muslims who can be helpful. The president or some of his advisers may well have a more sophisticated conception of the struggle into which we have been plunged than one that requires mainly persistence and "our will and courage." But the evidence for such an assertion is thin.

Exhibit A is the insistence on calling the struggle we're in a "war."

War implies the use of military force, most often against another nation-state, or at least against quasi-organized military or paramilitary forces. Certainly there will sometimes need to be a military component to U.S. activity in the coming years. However, as Cato Institute director of defense policy studies Charles Pena wrote recently (in the Register), "al-Qaida operatives are dispersed throughout 60 (or more) countries, and most, if not all, of those countries are not willing hosts - so regime change will not be an appropriate course of action."

Al-Qaida is not a nation-state or even a centralized power structure - and as terrorism expert Brian M. Jenkins pointed out in a seminar I attended a few weeks ago, it is only a component of a larger threat, which he calls the "jihadist" movement, that is as much an idea and an attitude as it is an organization. Confronting this identifiable yet dispersed and often-concealed threat will require a sophisticated campaign that operates on many levels.

A major component of a campaign that hopes to succeed will have to be isolating the jihadists from the millions of Muslims al-Qaida and others would like to recruit, and making alliances with Muslims who should be willing - perhaps even eager - to defeat the jihadist fringe that gives their religion a bad name.

This not only includes courting and understanding potentially sympathetic Muslims but avoiding actions that push potential allies into the hands of the real adversaries (as I would argue the war in Iraq has done) or lead otherwise uncommitted Muslims to view the jihadist extremists with a measure of sympathy.

At the seminar, Brian Jenkins, the former Green Beret who founded the Rand Corp.'s terrorism research program 30 years ago, offered the best view I have encountered into the mind of modern jihadists. Jihadists, he believes, see war as continuous, but Allah, not the jihadists, handles the grand strategy, and they are part of his master plan. Their attitude is therefore fatalistic and opportunistic.

Isolated raids, lying in wait, beleaguering the enemy and attacking when he is inattentive are all acceptable - and the attacks are undertaken not so much for the physical/strategic results they achieve but as opportunities to demonstrate faith, courage and prowess.

One might think the jihadists, insofar as they see themselves as enemies of the decadent West and its addiction to soulless technology, would abjure modern weapons, but they have no problem using the products of modern technology to (in their view) destroy those who produced them.

That's a daunting threat, not amenable to destruction by conventional military means. David Clark is probably right that "Al-Qaida's capacity to carry out horrific acts of violence may continue to grow, but its real mission - to establish a pan-Islamic theocracy - is doomed to end in failure." But those trying to achieve that quixotic mission can and probably will kill and hurt a lot of innocent people.

Trying to minimize the damage will take a deft combination of intelligence, law-enforcement vigilance and the occasional military or paramilitary strike. Ideally, it should be underpinned by an active effort to isolate the jihadists from ordinary Muslims, so they can't "swim in the sea" of Islam, can't depend on other Muslims to help them or even to hide them.

It happens that Rand has recently published a book, "Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources, and Strategies," that offers some preliminary insights into how to undertake this task of isolation, which as far as I can see the government hasn't begun to do and perhaps hasn't yet begun to think about seriously.

Written by Cheryl Benard, who has lived for the last few years in Yemen and traveled extensively in Islamic countries, the book seeks to identify Muslims who are potential allies in the struggle against jihadist terrorism.

Briefly, Ms. Benard argues that contemporary Islam is divided and volatile, "engaged in an internal struggle over its values, its identity, and its place in the world." Understanding which Muslims - the vast majority - can connect with and live in some semblance of peace with the modern globalized world can be the first step in helping them do so, and isolating the jihadists.

Ms. Benard identifies four main tendencies, which to some extent overlap:

Fundamentalists "reject democratic values and contemporary Western culture. They want an authoritarian, puritanical state that will implement their extreme view of Islamic law and morality."

Traditionalists "want a conservative society. They are suspicious of modernity, innovation and change."

Modernists "want the Islamic world to become part of global modernity. They want to modernize and reform Islam to bring it into line with the age."

Secularists "want the Islamic world to accept a division of church and state in the manner of Western industrial democracies, with religion relegated to the private sphere."

The fundamentalists, including the Wahabbis funded by the Saudis, have powerful financial and organizational advantages, including a plethora of publications and Web sites. Not all of them are jihadists, but there is little common ground between them and secular modern democracies. Notable among fundamentalists are the Algerian Islamic Salvation Front, Hizb-ut-Tahir, its materials published by the U.K.- based Al-Khilafah Publications, and the Web site IslamOnline. It is to our advantage for this tendency to weaken within the overall world of Islam.

Ms. Benard recommends supporting the modernists first, by identifying them, helping to publish and distribute their works, giving them a more public platform and helping them to reach a mass Islamic audience, especially among young people.

Among notable modernists are Khaled Abou El Fadl, professor of Islamic Law at UCLA; Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia; Bassam Tibi in Europe, and Fehullah Gulen, strongly influenced by the Sufi strain of Islam (www.mfgullen.com).

Secondly, she suggests supporting the traditionalists against the fundamentalists. The vast majority of Muslims are traditionalists who reject violence and extremism. There is a spectrum, from near-fundamentalism to near-modernism. Sheikh Tantawi, rector of Al Azhar University in Cairo and Yussuf al-Qaradawi, based in Qatar, who don't always agree on issues, are well-regarded traditionalists. Muhammad Al-Asi, former Imam of the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., is on the cusp between traditionalism and fundamentalism.

Westerners can discourage alliances between traditionalists and fundamentalists, and encourage traditionalists at the other end of the spectrum to get together with modernists where their interests coincide. Encouraging more intense education among traditionalists, so they can hold their own better against fundamentalists, would also be helpful.

All of this support and encouragement would require some delicacy. Perhaps the quickest way to destroy an influential Muslim's credibility in the Islamic world would be to create the impression that he (or she, in the case of some modernist reformers) is a puppet of the West - not that some will escape the charge even if or perhaps especially if they are stubbornly independent. It seems important to find Muslims who are already active and encourage or publicize them rather than imagining, as some Western strategists seem to, that we can create reform within Islam from outside.

Cheryl Benard is a little vague about who should be doing all this identifying, encouraging and subsidizing, although, since most of Rand's clients are government agencies, it's likely she sees governments in the West at the forefront. I would hope, however, that most of the missionary and mediation work would be done by private entities - philanthropists like George Soros, individual donors, foundations, think tanks, affluent Muslims living in the West, perhaps even mosques in Western countries.

The best thing the government can do, in my view, is to change policy from being an aggressive armed missionary on behalf of our vision of democracy to one that sees us still as the friend of freedom everywhere but the guarantor only of our own, combined with a scrupulous respect for the rights of other countries to order their own affairs so long as they don't pose threats to others.

That's unlikely, of course, and even if the United States were to adopt that policy sincerely it would be years before people in the rest of the world believed it, even after we began bringing troops home from the dozens of countries where they are stationed permanently. But it would remove numerous points of potential conflict and resentment.

Short of such an outburst of common sense, however, a recognition that military action cannot be the only or even the major means of dealing with terrorists is the first step toward getting serious about terrorism.