Terrorism in a material sense doesn't accomplish much: A country will never be defeated by terrorism, killing soft targets does no good for that. You'll note that terrorists never target military and only rarely target state institutions. Why is that? We know what the actions of terrorism are, but what is the purpose of terrorism?
Don't say they're just crazy fanatics, because true or not that's not enough. There are a lot of crazy fanatics in the world. Even among the group of violent crazy fanatics, only a portion of them commit terrorism. What draws the line between Heaven's Gate and Timothy McVeigh?
Well, Heaven's Gate wanted to go on the mothership and Timothy McVeigh wanted to destroy the US government. But Timothy McVeigh could not seriously have believed that the act of blowing up the Oklahoma City Federal Building, no matter how ridiculously successful it could have been, would destroy the US government.
So was he just stupid or something? Perish the thought. Someone who reads radical literature, learns how to gather weapons, learns how to handle explosives, and meticulously plans the act of terrorism isn't so stupid as to believe that their action magically leads to the goal unless it contains a path to that goal.
So why did he blow up the Oklahoma City Federal Building and kill over one hundred people? The answer is the "propaganda of the deed", as old school revolutionaries would have put it. The attack on Oklahoma City was plastered all over America's media, and reached everybody in the country. It, through happening, ignited a low-scale civil conflict between federal police and the nation's militia movements that before this point in time did not exist. The FBI kept tabs on those people, sure, but they were not concerned about them without the existence of actionable intel. Oklahoma City changed that for decades, such that only in the last few years have we seen militias start to operate openly again.
Islamic terrorists, then. What is their real goal? It's not to kill the infidel or attain Paradise. Those are a bonus at best, and anybody smart enough to pull off terrorism is smart enough to have some degree of doubt in their mind about God and what God wants. There is a greater geopolitical goal to Islamic terrorism, which at least terrorist suppliers know even if some of the triggermen don't.
And that goal is not a secret. I don't think it's controversial to say that the highest magnitude singular terrorist action is 9/11. 9/11 was planned but not personally executed by Osama bin Laden, and he told us exactly and in plain tongue what his goal of terrorism was. Funny that almost all of us just sort of glossed over that. He wanted the removal of America's influence from the Islamic world. How does 9/11 accomplish that goal, then?
I mean, we invaded two separate Islamic nations over it and basically never left, so it seems to be a failure in a military sense. Laden should have, as an educated person, known perfectly well that invoking American military strength is an unwinnable fight.
So was he just stupid or something? No. What is the goal of terrorism? What is the goal of radical Islamic terrorism?
I say it's to make the Western world kill itself. Not be invaded by Muslim refugees, not be meaningfully turned towards adopting Islam, but to invoke the West's own ideology and make that unstoppable cultural, economic, and military force turn on the West and destroy it.
So when people say "we're in a war with all Muslims, we need to take extreme action against them, they're not even our people anyway"? They're the goal of terrorism. It's a grand irony. The same people who say those concerned with human rights are the cat's paw of terrorists are themselves the cat's paw of terrorists. The "Clash of Civilizations" rhetoric is true, it's just not being applied correctly. The real clash is the West being told a message through terrorism, and that message is: "Hey, you see that huge gun you've got there? Man, you really want to kill me, and if you just put that gun to your head and pull the trigger I'll be gone forever. What do ya say?"
"Hell yeah, let's abandon our humanity to 'protect ourselves', the final war is now motherfuckers" reactions are the goal of terrorism. Why would Islamic terrorists ever want Muslims living in the West to become integrated with it? That's the end of their rope. They need the West to attack and reject Muslims in general, otherwise they'd run out of recruits willing to sacrifice themselves.