Old cliches don't die, they just get older. An old cliche mentions the futility of "swatting flies with an elephant gun". There are worse ways to swat flies.
A commentator on a radio show I was listening to this morning about the war in Iraq and military recruiters defended the rights of anti-recruitment and anti-war groups to spread their message, but also called them out for not suggesting alternative other than "sticking their heads in the sand." The implication is that doing something is always better than doing nothing, and the the current war is at least doing something about terrorism (the dubious connection between the war in Iraq and terror groups notwithstanding).
I disagree. We should be opposing it, because the way we are going about it is worse than doing nothing, in that while it may make things a little better in the short term, is it almost certainly making things worse overall, and in time we will see and feel these effects. And more broadly, there is no military solution to terrorism - it is like swatting flies with .. well, you know the rest.
To draw a more complete analogy, consider acts of terrorism to be malaria, and those who commit such acts to be mosquitos. Mosquitos breed in pools of standing water. So we have some military folk come in and determine that we must eliminate the places for mosquitos to breed: we must destroy these pools of standing water. So naturally, we call in artillery strikes. They blast the pools with pinpoint accuracy, kill millions of mosquitos, and declare the problem solved. Excapt that the very tactic used to clear up the problem makes it worse. The artillery shells destroy alot that they weren't intended to. And they dig more holes in the ground, create more places for the water to pool, and next season the mosquitos will be worse than ever.
Of course, terrorists aren't mosquitos and they don't breed in pools of water. Instead, they breed in pools of despair. However, the military tactics we use against them have a very similar effect - short-term gains with much collateral damage, and I don't even want to think about what next season will be like.
