Last Sunday, gunmen armed with machine guns burst into a church in Islamabad and started killing Christians at worship. I'm afraid there are going to be a lot more incidents like this while the war goes on.

That is not, however, a reason for ending the war: on the contrary, it is why the war must be continued until western civilisation is victorious. Terrorism did not start with the bombing of New York on September 11. It has been going on for at least 30 years. The crucial difference made by the September 11 atrocities was their scale. For a generation, western governments have tried to ignore terrorism and hope that, by doing so, the problem would go away. Well, we have seen the result: going easy on terrorists emboldens them to commit ever grosser acts of barbarism.

Belatedly, we in the western world have woken up to the fact that highly-organised, fanatical enemies in many countries want above all things to kill us. We have an alternative: be wiped out or fight back. The trouble with the fight-back is that it involves casualties - and sometimes these casualties are innocent civilians.

In the Second World War, 600,000 Germans - most of them civilians - were killed by Allied bombers. But, between 1941 and the D-Day landings in 1944, bombing was the only weapon we had and, if we had not bombed German cities ruthlessly, then Hitler would have triumphed. British cities were bombed night after night for months on end. People put up with it because they knew that the alternative was defeat, slavery and death. So in this new war, we must put up with it. We must, as the Prime Minister says, hold our nerve. We must defeat the terrorists.

You would expect then that the whole country would rally behind the war effort. Instead, what do we get? We get the broadcast media talking as if they are BBC Taliban. I've lost count of how many times the first item on the news is not of successes in the campaign but of some stray and accidental bomb which has killed civilians. Imagine what would have happened to morale if such incidents had been first on the news in the Second World War. Imagine what will happen to our morale now if this sort of reporting continues.

The latest and particularly ripe piece of wimpish defeatism is the BBC's suggestion that we ought to stop bombing when the Muslim holy season of Ramadan begins in a couple of weeks time. What, and allow the enemy breathing space in which to regroup and re-supply? Do you think Osama bin Laden would call off his suicide bombers for long enough to let me to go to Matins? By the way, September 11 is in the Octave of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Feast Day of Saints Protus and Hyacinth. That didn't give the suicide bombers pause, did it?

The best intelligence we have has warned us that, unless the terrorists are beaten, they will be back - and within a very short time they will have nuclear weapons. That is the measure of how crucial it is that we continue to wage war thoroughly until victory is achieved. So, let's have no more squeamishness. We need sinew-stiffening all round.

Published: Tuesday, October 30, 2001