Deeds, as ever, speak more eloquently than words. Al-Qaeda isn't finished. Its structure - devolved, barely organised by conventional standards - can survive any number of strikes at individual bases. There's no command and control system to disrupt: just loose groupings of the desperate and the deluded with trucks full of explosive or grenades strapped to their waists, ready to die from Casablanca to Riyadh. Blood brothers of the Israeli bus bombers.

You can't cut off the head, because the manic heart still beats on regardless.

Afghanistan, we may guess, gave the guys some pause. There was, at least, a brief pause once it was over. By contrast, Iraq seems to have had no impact whatsoever. Our boys are barely back from the Gulf before terror carries on its dismal way. It is killing business as usual - the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam business of yesteryear replicated from Morocco to Saudi Arabia.

Yet these deeds, in their brutal banality, also tell an interesting story. Nuclear weapons, dirty bombs, weapons of mass destruction? They may be part of the long-term planning, part of the dreaming. Scary sketches and formulas scribbled in pencil. But they are not, for the moment, part of the reality. That is relentlessly low-tech, as basic as a bad day on the West Bank, or an outrage in the Algeria of 30 years ago. Synchronise watches, light the blue touch paper and self-destruct immediately.

The targets, time after time, are relentlessly soft. A nightclub of young Aussies in Bali; sleepy Western compounds in Saudi; a Jewish centre and Spanish social club in Casablanca - where the man with the bomb arrived with a long knife. You can't defend yourself against threats like these. They're no-brainers, picked for no particularly cogent reason. They don't even single out the enemies of bin Laden for particular treatment. Most of those who were maimed or murdered in Casablanca were ordinary Moroccans.

So collect the clues. Will this agglomeration of terror come to central London or, again, to Manhattan? Perhaps. But it's rather likelier to visit downtown Cairo or Kuala Lumpur first. That, strategically, is the PR boon left over from September 11: you don't need to take big risks to garner big headlines any longer. More ordinary mayhem will serve just as well. One unspecified threat to Kenya blanks out East Africa for the duration.

Worse, there's no shortage of recruits, human fodder for annihilation. Western terrorist threats such as ETA or the IRA can mount continuing campaigns using very few active fighters; maybe a hundred or two max. If either had lost 20 men in a couple of attacks, that would have been disaster. But not for al-Qaeda. It, seemingly, has volunteers to spare. It can lose one to kill one. It doesn't need to husband resources. It thinks it has tens of thousands to spare.

Yet there is some frail reason for hope in such conclusions. Who will really suffer most after Casablanca, for instance? Moroccans. One lifeline of progress there - tourism - lies snapped for the moment. It is the same in Kenya, where a new democratic Government has to muster its resources.

Closed, claustrophobic societies such as Saudi Arabia are pressure-cookers when the heat comes on. Open or half-open societies are programmed to respond very differently. They know how much they have to lose. The message of bin Laden has scant relevance to their daily lives. It is a maverick howl, not a call to revolution. And here, for the West, is the essential dislocation.

We fight the threat of terror - real and imagined - by abandoning liberties, tightening the state's grip, cutting the corners of freedom. That's one story since September 11. It is replicated in Riyadh and Rabat. Authority under challenge cracks down automatically. But the ultimate defence in this campaign against terror is precisely the reverse. It is the rejection of suppression that casts the terrorist in the least kindly light. Morocco needs to be more free, not less. The princelings of the house of Saud are the problem, not the solution.

Is democracy, as we were told, on the way for Baghdad? Maybe. But the calls grow weaker as the complexities mount. The lacuna of a free Iraqi government that blithely supports George Bush becomes ever more evident. Nevertheless, for all the surrounding doubts and sorrows, Iraq needs to find a voice - just as Iran, lost for decades to a particular strain of Islam, is struggling to find one.

And these voices, right across the wider Muslim world, can only flourish in a setting of growing normality. The Arab "street" has to have something better than death and destruction to look forward to.

One of the best, but least rehearsed, lessons of the Afghan aftermath can be found in the "pure state of Islam" - Pakistan today. That doesn't mean that a general in braid is the best man to be president. But the press has regained a certain vibrancy - and the supposedly extremist religious parties that won power in Peshawar, amid great apprehension, have concentrated on decent governance rather than agitation.

You do not, in sum, have to walk on the wild side if there's a better way; and those who take a wilder route can gradually be isolated. That's how al-Qaeda and its 18,000 or so foot soldiers disperses in the end. Amid public derision. That - one distant day - is the promise of the Israel "road map" to peace. And that is the lesson we in the West need to learn, too.

Defeat these terrorists by building more walls around the gated society of the West? Humiliate the street by braggart wars? No: freedom, like realism, begins at home.