Have a look at Ralph Peters' essay in this summer's issue of Parameters. Turns out, the only way we're going to be able to defeat the terrorists is to kill them:
And we shall hear that killing terrorists only creates more terrorists. This is sophomoric nonsense. The surest way to swell the ranks of terror is to follow the approach we did in the decade before 9/11 and do nothing of substance. Success breeds success. Everybody loves a winner. The clich?s exist because they're true. Al Qaeda and related terrorist groups metastasized because they were viewed in the Muslim world as standing up to the West successfully and handing the Great Satan America embarrassing defeats with impunity. Some fanatics will flock to the standard of terror, no matter what we do. But it's far easier for Islamic societies to purge themselves of terrorists if the terrorists are on the losing end of the global struggle than if they're allowed to become triumphant heroes to every jobless, unstable teenager in the Middle East and beyond.
Far worse than fighting such a war of attrition aggressively is to pretend you're not in one while your enemy keeps on killing you.
And Peters continues:
Curiously, while our military avoids a "body count" in Iraq--body counts have at least as bad a name as wars of attrition--the media insist on one. Sad to say, the body count cherished by the media is the number of our own troops dead and wounded. With our over-caution, we have allowed the media to create a perception that the losses are consistently on our side. By avoiding an enemy body count, we create an impression of our own defeat.
In a war of attrition, numbers matter.