IN 1998, OSAMA bin Laden declared war on the United States by means of a fatwa, stating that it is the individual duty of every Muslim to kill Americans and their allies — civilians and military.

In the 10 years since then, three administrations have been unable to decide whether or not we are fighting a war or simply dealing with a law-enforcement problem. The two approaches are fundamentally different.

War is offensive in nature and is focused on achieving victory. In our current situation, the objective is to prevent future attacks by keeping the pressure on the enemy. Law enforcement, on the other hand, is defensive in nature and is focused on rules and procedures. The primary objective is to bring criminals to justice after a crime has been committed.

The FBI’s actions after the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 clearly illustrate both the strengths and weaknesses of the law-enforcement approach. The FBI and other agencies did a near-perfect job of tracking down the terrorists and putting them behind bars. Unfortunately, that success did nothing to deter future attacks.

In the real world, things are rarely as clean as these two approaches, and today is no exception. The fight we are currently in is a complex mixture of counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, conventional war, and law enforcement. Neither the international law of armed conflict nor U.S. domestic law was designed to cope with such a fight. The British understood that and used both law enforcement and military methods during their successful counterinsurgency operation in Malaya during the 1950s. They used the two in such a way that both techniques worked to their advantage.

We, on the other hand, seem determined to use the two methods in a way that works to our disadvantage. The application of the doctrine of habeas corpus to foreign terrorists captured and held overseas provides a good example of this phenomenon.

Often called “the Great Writ,” habeas corpus is a procedure for obtaining judicial determination of the legality of an individual’s custody. The conditions of its applicability have been the subject of numerous court cases over the years, but, until recently, applying it to enemies who were not U.S. citizens and who were captured and held overseas would have been unlikely.

Unlikely as it might have seemed, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in its 2008 decision, Boumediene, et al v. Bush, that the petitioners, enemy combatants being held at Guantánamo, had the right to have the legality of their detention be determined by a civilian court. The path that led to that decision was a tortured one that included the reversal of lower-court decisions and rulings that various efforts by Congress to provide an alternative to habeas corpus were inadequate.

In his dissent to the 5-4 decision, Justice Scalia warned, “It sets our military commanders the impossible task of providing to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.” Some who worried about the impact of the ruling took comfort in wording that seemed to indicate that it applied only to individuals held at Guantánamo.

Any such comfort vanished in April this year when U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled in Washington, D.C., that habeas corpus applied to three of four individuals who had contested their detention at the U.S. air base at Bagram, Afghanistan.

The direction in which our government has steadily been moving in this regard has been the subject of numerous discussions I have had with officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than once in those discussions, someone joked, “What’s next, reading our enemies their Miranda rights?” At the time, it was just that, a joke.

During the presidential campaign, then-candidate Obama acted as if it were a joke by treating Gov. Sarah Palin dismissively when she said in her acceptance speech for the GOP vice presidential nomination that “he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.” As president, he reaffirmed his position in a March interview on 60 Minutes by asking whether terrorists “deserve Miranda rights” and answering his own question with an unequivocal, “Of course not.”

After an initial denial by the Department of Defense, the Justice Department recently admitted that FBI agents were, in fact, reading Miranda rights to certain prisoners in Afghanistan. If we truly are going to treat terrorism as simply a law-enforcement problem, reading captured terrorists their Miranda rights makes sense. If not, it places an intolerable burden on our military and intelligence personnel who are fighting a vicious and unprincipled enemy in many places around the world.

What’s next? Will our troops fighting block by block through some foreign city require a search warrant before they can kick down a door? Will every firefight be treated as a crime scene? That might seem ridiculous, but so did reading Miranda rights to captured terrorists not so long ago.

Given the state of uncertainly that now exists, one can only wonder what other “jokes” are out there waiting to come true and what the consequences will be when they do.

Col. Theodore L. Gatchel (USMC Ret.), a monthly contributor, is a military historian and a professor emeritus of operations at the Naval War College. The views here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of any federal agency.