Where terrorism is concerned, we should worry a great deal more about what we don’t see than what we do see.

When confronted with a terrorist campaign, there is a consistent tendency by military counter-terrorists to try and quantify progress, or the lack of it, in numeric form. An awareness of the numbers involved yields the illusion of control. Senior officers armed with numerically quantified charts make statements like: “There remains a great deal of work to be done, but we are confident that we can surmount the challenges that face us.”

That is code for: “I truly, deeply and madly do not what is going on, but I have a sneaking suspicion that whatever it is - is not good for my career -and I want to get out of here ASAP.”

Which is code for: “We’re fxxxed!”

Microsoft’s PowerPoint may well be terrorism’s greatest friend.

My essential point here is that there is a great deal more to a terrorist campaign than bombs and bullets – and that military counter-terrorists have a pronounced tendency to focus on easily quantifiable incidents of violence instead of untangling, and countering, what else the bad guys have been up to.

The truth is that the most serious consequences of terrorism, which have to do with the suborning of the population, are rarely violent in themselves. Violence – and the threat of it - may well help to set the conditions, but the results that ensue from the climate of passion, fear, hate, resentment and hope that is thus created are normally both hard to read and near impossible to quantify. They can, however, be sensed. Counter-terrorism is hugely about feelings, about empathy, about knowing your enemy, and about timing.

The conduct of effective counter-terrorism arguably bears a closer relationship to an involvement in an intense, but doomed, love affair, than to conventional war. It is an intimate, deadly business leavened with intense encounters, misunderstandings, deceptions, conflicting desires and emotion.

It is mutually destructive and rarely is there an easy solution.

But let me close with an example of what terrorists can achieve apart from blowing up things and killing people. In Ireland’s War of Independence against the British – which lasted, very roughly, from 1916-1921 – the Irish freedom fighters (called terrorists or insurgents by the British) stripped effective government control of the population from the British and transferred it to a new, albeit unofficial, Irish administration, before the British really understood what was going on. By the time the British ceded control of Ireland to the Irish, they had, in fact, already lost it in practical terms. Being militarily stronger, and much better armed, the British had won most of the fights, but, virtually without realizing it, they had lost the war.

Does the word ‘Iraq’ resonate in this context.

By the way, independent Ireland is now the richest country in Europe after Luxemburg.