In a Colombo bar in 1988, during one of Sri Lanka’s intervals between battles, I heard an Indian journalist tell a joke about Khalistan. In the imagined first cabinet meeting of the new Sikh state, ministers described irrigation schemes, textile corridors and the sober work of government. Then the defence minister stood.“Attack America,” he said.The prime minister was startled. “Why?”“Look at Japan. It attacked America. America won. Japan got bullet trains, robots and an economic miracle.”The cabinet applauded. Cries of Khalistan Zindabad filled the room. At the far end of the table, an old schoolteacher leaned forward. “But son,” he asked gently, “what if we win?”The joke was about Khalistan, but the schoolteacher’s question belongs to every counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaign. It asks not only how the enemy will be beaten, but what kind of country will remain when he is gone.September 11 did not begin the age of terrorism. It began the age in which one act of terrorism reorganised the world. In the twenty-five years that followed, states became much better at finding terrorists, following their money, hardening targets and destroying their organisations. They learned much less about what should follow the destruction.The gains were real. Intelligence moved more freely between agencies and countries. Aircraft became harder to hijack. Financial controls made money more difficult to move. Al-Qaeda lost leaders, camps and sanctuary. The campaign against Islamic State stripped it of cities, taxes and the boast that it governed a caliphate. Police and intelligence services stopped plots that will never acquire memorials because their intended victims are alive.These successes worked best against things that could be found: a bank transfer, a training camp, a commander, a column of vehicles, a piece of territory. A cockpit can be hardened. A grievance cannot. The tools were useful. The mistake was to ask them to do the work of politics.Part of the trouble lay in the namePart of the trouble lay in the name. Terrorism describes a method: a bomb in a market, a gunman in a hotel, a hijacked aircraft. Separatism describes an end, however wise or foolish: a state, a border, a flag. Counterterrorism tries to stop the bomb and catch the bomber. Counterinsurgency asks who rules a village and why its people obey him. State-building asks whether courts, police, schools and ministries can govern without foreign soldiers standing behind them. After 9/11 these unlike tasks were packed into the same word. To call a movement terrorist was often to pretend that one had also explained the quarrel.The word was useful to governments. Russia used it for Chechnya. China invoked extremism to justify mass surveillance and detention in Xinjiang. Pakistan fought armed groups that threatened the state while protecting others that served its purposes. India has treated Kashmiri militancy and Kashmiri politics as though they were the same thing. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the wider Hindutva movement have since widened that suspicion beyond Kashmir, making Muslim citizens answer for terrorists who invoke their faith. Sri Lanka recast its long war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as part of the global campaign against terrorism. Once every enemy wore the same label, the bomb remained visible and the grievance could be ignored. A state cannot isolate the violent few while majoritarian politics puts the whole community in the dock.Before Velupillai Prabhakaran’s name became known far beyond Sri Lanka, I sat opposite him in Madras as a young Indian photojournalist. He described the killing of Jaffna’s Tamil mayor and the ambush in which thirteen Sri Lankan soldiers died, the act that helped set off the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983. He did not rave or threaten. He spoke as a clerk might speak after the columns had balanced. Then he extended his hand.I took it. The hand was soft, almost reluctant. There was nothing in it to hold.That meeting returned to mind after 9/11, when the enemy was often described as though he belonged to another species. But men who arrange murders remain men. They eat, joke, reason and sleep well. The fact is repellent because it is useful. If the murderer is merely a monster, there is nothing to understand and the state need ask nothing about the society that made his reasoning possible.To explain a crime is not to pardon it. A grievance does not excuse the murder of a civilian, and a history of repression does not cleanse a bomb. But a state that refuses to distinguish explanation from excuse deprives itself of knowledge. It can kill the man and leave untouched the reasoning by which another will replace him.The post-9/11 wars did this on a larger scale. Afghanistan began with a limited object: break al-Qaeda and deny it sanctuary. Then the object grew. The war would defeat an insurgency, build a state and change a society. Elections were held. Schools opened. Afghan women gained freedoms the Taliban had denied them. These things mattered. Beneath them stood corruption, foreign dependence and officials who preyed on the people they governed. Raids, rifles and dead commanders could be counted. No table could show whether Afghans believed the government was their own. When foreign troops left in 2021, the government collapsed within days.Iraq was worse because its first object was false. The Bush administration used 9/11 to justify a war the evidence did not connect to the attacks. The occupation broke the state, sent the army home and barred whole classes of officials from public life. It turned trained and angry men out into a ruined political order that had no place for them. Al-Qaeda in Iraq grew there. Islamic State inherited it.Human rights were often treated as a sentimental restraint upon effectivenessCivilian deaths, torture, indefinite detention and disappearance were not items to be entered in a moral debit column after the military work was done. They were part of the military result. A father killed, a prisoner humiliated, a son who does not return: each becomes a fact around which a family arranges its memory. Human rights were often treated as a sentimental restraint upon effectiveness. In a counterinsurgency they are part of effectiveness. A government that humiliates the people from whom an armed movement recruits may win today’s raid and make tomorrow’s recruit.Outside powers also chose their partners badly. They asked whether a government opened its bases, shared its files and arrested the names on a list. They asked less often how it governed. A partner could be called reliable even when its police, prisons and local officials reproduced the conflict. Training a force without changing the politics that direct it may merely make repression more efficient. A state does not become just because its enemy is cruel.Separatist conflicts show the limits of force most clearly. An armed movement may commit atrocities, extort the people it claims to defend and grow more brutal than the state it opposes. None of this means that destroying it will settle the argument over sovereignty, territory, autonomy or belonging. States can defeat an organisation. They cannot shoot a political question.Sri Lanka proved that force could destroy an organisation. In May 2009, its armed forces killed Prabhakaran and seized the territory the LTTE controlled. But victory did not tell families where the disappeared had gone. It did not produce an accepted account of the war’s last months or a settlement that made Tamil citizens equal in their dealings with the police, the army and government offices. The organisation was defeated. The grievance was placed under guard.The other South Asian cases differ, which is why the same label misleads. Kashmir combines local anger, separatist aspiration, help from across the border, religious militancy and a quarrel between two nuclear states. To call it all terrorism is to mistake the weapon for the war. In Balochistan, the Baloch Liberation Army kills civilians and attacks soldiers, police stations and trains. The state answers with arrests, but also with enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention and the repression of peaceful activists. One crime does not cancel the other. Each helps the other endure.Manipur is different again. The conflict is fought over land, political power and safety between communities, while older separatist movements and the troubled border with Myanmar lie beneath it. Since 2023, about 260 people have been killed and more than 60,000 displaced; violence flared again in April 2026. This is what a convenient label conceals. The dead can be counted. The quarrel still has to be described.None of these cases proves that every separatist group deserves a new flag. A state cannot divide itself whenever men take up guns; nor may it forget citizens who reject the separatists. But unity maintained by emergency law, collective suspicion and military posts is not political unity. The question is whether those who want another flag may argue, organise and seek votes for it without planting a bomb – or being jailed merely for asking.The opposite of separatism is not military victoryThe opposite of separatism is not military victory. It is a political order in which a separatist claim can continue without a bomb.Punjab itself complicates the pattern. By the early 1990s, police action – much of it brutal – had broken up the Khalistan insurgency, and elections had returned. India restored order without settling how the violence of 1984 should be remembered or redressed.Northern Ireland shows what that political order requires The Good Friday Agreement did not decide for all time whether Northern Ireland should be British or Irish. It decided how the border might be changed and required former enemies to govern together. The agreement changed policing, released prisoners and protected both constitutional claims. The argument survived; the IRA’s armed campaign did not. The achievement was not agreement about the past or even the future. It was agreement about how the future could be fought over without killing.Spain followed another path. It did not hand the Basque Country to ETA, and there was no single bargain that ended the conflict. Police pressure, regional self-government, legal politics and the public’s declining willingness to excuse murder gradually left ETA without a convincing purpose. It ended its armed campaign and dissolved in 2018. Military triumph produces a date and a photograph. Political settlement leaves behind an argument that can continue without a bomb.South Asia has its own evidence. Nepal’s 2006 Comprehensive Peace Accord brought Maoist insurgents into politics and made the monarchy’s future a question for voters. Victims still wait for justice, but the former insurgents now seek power through parties and elections. In the southern Philippines, the Bangsamoro process joined security pressure to autonomy, disarmament and a way out of armed struggle. Neither case produced good government by magic. A struggle for the state became a quarrel inside the state.The Kurdish case is now testing the same possibility. After four decades of conflict, the PKK announced in 2025 that it would disarm and dissolve. Turkey was still working in June 2026 on laws for disbandment and political integration. A proclamation can end an organisation on paper. It cannot by itself settle the Kurdish question. Pressure may create an opening; only politics can keep it open.By 2026 the figures looked better. The Global Terrorism Index recorded a 28% fall in deaths in 2025. Yet, nearly 70% of them occurred in five countries: Pakistan, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Sahel still accounted for more than half. In Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, where France spent a decade fighting and Russian forces later arrived, fewer attacks did not mean weaker groups. Jihadists held territory, closed roads and choked cities. Only one per cent of deaths occurred outside countries already touched by conflict. Terrorism was retreating from places at peace and sinking deeper into places already at war. For the first time since the Index began, Pakistan ranked as the country most affected by terrorism..The threat has changed too. A spectacular operation directed from a central headquarters has become harder to organise. In its place are Islamic State affiliates, borderland insurgencies, lone actors and young people who can pass quickly from private resentment to an online creed that gives them an enemy. The same index found that 64% of attacks occurred within 100 kilometres of an international border. The slogan may come from abroad. The quarrel is usually local.The war has an enemy but no purposeMajor powers now look elsewhere: to China, Russia, military technology and war between states. Some correction was overdue. The war on terror distorted policy and made permanent emergency appear normal. The answer is not to restore terrorism to the commanding place it held after 9/11. It is to keep what worked without keeping the fear: intelligence cooperation, capable police, lawful courts and attention to conflicts after the cameras leave.The lesson of the quarter-century is less dramatic than the war declared in its name. Force may be necessary. But before it is used, a government should be able to say what peace is meant to look like. Negotiation is not always possible, and it always carries a cost. Yet a refusal to distinguish the negotiable from the irreconcilable is not firmness. It allows the gun to answer a political question that no gun can answer.Force can break a cell, kill a commander and retake a city. It cannot make a corrupt government legitimate, an unequal citizen equal or a disappeared man come home. Every campaign should therefore answer the schoolteacher before the first shot is fired: What if we win?If the answer is only that the enemy will be dead, the war has an enemy but no purpose.Shyam Tekwani is a professor and columnist specialising in security affairs. Views expressed in this article are those of the author.