LOS ANGELES

THE SEVEN-YEAR war on terror has been, and will remain, a losing proposition.

We can fight a classic military war against troops, but not against wraiths. That is why Steve Coll’s seminal book on the roots of the jihadist mess (roots watered generously by the U.S. government) was titled Ghost Wars: The Soviets military in Afghanistan found to its consternation that its enemy rose up and vanished like ghosts.

We also have to choose our wars carefully, with some perspective. Jihadist hillbillies running around Pakistani frontier villages in baggy pajama shalwars cannot destroy the American experiment, especially if we work carefully to keep them separated from the most dangerous tools of destruction.

But that takes careful and unglamorous police work, not a costly global war that infuriates rivals and allies alike. It is an awful irony that we helped bankrupt the Soviet empire by funding the jihadist resistance to their overreaching, and that Osama bin Laden proclaimed in late 2004 that the same jihadist network would ultimately bleed the United States through a war of attrition.

(We have helped our greatest enemy in his efforts by our own willingness to go further into debt for an Iraq debacle that will cost us $3 trillion in long-term costs, by the calculations of Nobel-laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Kennedy School Prof. Linda Bilmes.)

The Taliban crowd does despise our freedoms, but they usually cannot even make their own Muslim citizenries yield to their dreams of sharia and neurotic asceticism. As the riveting 2007 Pakistani film In the Name of God illustrates, most jihadists are quite busy with a civil war against their own religion’s moderate majority.

One of the jihadists’ best tactics, though, is to convince moderates that the United States is their common enemy. The clumsiness of both the rhetoric and the muscle of the American government has been of enormous service to those jihadists.

The threat of spectacular terrorist strikes has become a cynical, unspoken pact among jihadist and republican. It lets each portray the other as a great villain, which is the best way to appear as a great hero by contrast. Yet if the jihadists were serious about affecting everyday American life, they would have adopted the small-scale, hard-to-defend tactics used by guerrillas in many nations.

The Bush administration took the reins of power convinced that Russia and China would be this nation’s greatest foreign-policy challenges, as reflected by how then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to offer a major policy speech on 9/11 on missile defense — with no mention of terror. For an administration famed for its incompetence, its first instincts may have been right.

Yet the administration’s better judgment was overridden by the need — no, the opportunity — to act like bold Churchillian heroes preventing Muslim Hitlers from forcing us to prostrate ourselves before Mecca. This quickened Americans’ latent thirst for a worthy, uh, crusade, and immediately all politicians had to submit to the new orthodoxy.

And when President Bush, in a rare moment of candor, admitted during his re-election campaign that a war on terror can never be fully won, Democrats foolishly used terror as a tool for themselves, claiming they could win it if given the chance.

You cannot declare war on an emotion or a mood, be it terror or the blues or the blahs. You can simply choose not to be a slave to it.

This is not to say that war hawks are always wrong and doves are always right. A rich irony presented by the war has been how it has consumed hawks in a way that keeps them from effectively dealing with any other threats. John McCain, having declared that Islamic extremism is “the transcendental challenge of the 21st Century,” has no bullets left to back up his bluster toward neo-imperial Russia.

As erstwhile Republican strategist Kevin Phillips presciently wrote several years ago, “Most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, and ultimately burning themselves out.”

Indeed. We must fight smarter, not harder. Fight a better fight, not a war on terror that is simply a convenient way for politicians to scare off rivals to their power. Too much is at stake for us to claim that everything must be staked on this silly, concocted war.

Rob Asghar, an occasional contributor, is a Los Angeles-based Pakistani-American writer.