Some things are so obvious that you feel almost embarrassed to repeat them ? but if you don?t say them, the propagandists win.

There is no shadowy but powerful network waging a terrorist war against the West: the whole thing is a fantasy. There are isolated small groups of extremists who blow things up once in a while, and there are websites and other media through which they can exchange ideas and techniques, but there are no headquarters, no chain of command, no organization that can be defeated, dismantled and destroyed.

There never was much of an Islamist ?terrorist network? anyway. Even in al Qaida?s heyday, before the US invasion of Afghanistan beheaded it in 2001, there were only a few hundred core members.

According to American intelligence estimates, between 30,000 and 70,000 volunteers passed through al Qaida?s training camps in Afghanistan in 1996-2001, but their long-term impact on the world has been astonishingly small. The average annual number of Islamist terrorist attacks in Arab and other Muslim countries has been no greater in the past five years than in the previous ten or twenty.

The West has been even less affected. The 9/11 attacks on the United States of America were a spectacularly successful fluke, killing almost 3,000 people, but there have been no further Islamist attacks in the US. The two subsequent attacks that did occur in the West, in Madrid in 2004 and in London last year, cost the lives of 245 people. And those attacks were both carried out by local people with no links to any ?international terrorist network?.

Road not taken

The contrast between the received wisdom ? that the world, or at least the West, is engaged in a titanic, unending struggle against a powerful terrorist organization of global reach ? and the not-very-impressive reality is so great that most Westerners believe the official narrative rather than the evidence of their own eyes. There must be a major terrorist threat; otherwise, the government is wrong or lying, the intelligence agencies are wrong or self-serving, and the media are fools or cowards.

But there isn?t a major terrorist threat; just a little one. The huge over-reaction is because 9/11 hit a big and powerful country that had the military resources to strike anywhere in the world, and strategic interests that might be advanced by a war or two fought under the cover of a crusade against terrorism. If 9/11 had happened in Canada, it would all have been very different.

A kind of 9/11 did happen in Canada. The largest casualty toll of any terrorist attack in the West before 2001 was the 329 people who were killed in the terrorist bombing of Air India Flight 182, en route from Toronto to London, in 1985. Two hundred and eighty of the dead were Canadian citizens. Since Canada has only one-tenth the population of the US, it was almost exactly the same proportionate loss that the US suffered in 9/11.

It was immediately clear that the terrorists were Sikhs seeking independence from India, but here?s what Canada did not do: it did not send troops into India to ?stamp out the roots of the terrorism? and it did not declare a ?global war on terror.? Partly because it lacked the resources for that sort of adventure, of course, but also because it would have been stupid. Instead, it tightened up security at airports, and launched a police investigation into the attack.

The investigation was not very successful, and 21 years later, most of the culprits have still not been punished. But Sikh terrorism eventually died down even though nobody invaded the Punjab, and nobody else got hurt in Canada. The US would have had to lean on the Afghan regime quite hard to get the al Qaida camps shut down after 9/11, but that, on the whole, would have been the right reaction to that attack, too. And nothing more.