"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed," says the poet William Butler Yeats, "and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned."

Today, this "tide" stands as a convenient metaphor for terrorism. Whether it can be stemmed in time, America's war on terror should certainly be conducted with a greater awareness and understanding of time.

True chronology in counterterrorism must embrace more than the uniform intervals of clocks. For America's determined Islamist terrorist enemies, time means something very personal. For these jihadists, real time has more to do with the subjective idea of felt time than it does with any standard measures of duration. Were it otherwise, the United States would already have been hit with substantial and potentially deadly follow-on strikes to 9/11.

Time's most authentic meanings are rooted in religion and culture. Historically, the idea of felt time – of time-as-lived rather than clock time – has its roots in ancient Israel. Rejecting the mundane idea of time as linear progression, the early Hebrews approached chronology as a qualitative experience. In that context, all time was logically inseparable from its personally incorporated importance.

The original Jewish prophetic vision was that of a community existing in time under a transcendent God. Political space in this vision was important, but not because of space itself. Instead, the significance of space (today we would speak of "land," especially in the Middle East) derived only from the uniquely sacred events that took place therein.

A greater awareness of the subjective metaphysics of time, a reality that is based not on equally numbered moments but rather upon representations of time as lived, should now guide the way America confronts its principal terrorist enemies. This means struggling to understand the manner in which these Islamists actually live within time. Ultimately, this requires an understanding of precise obligations that are drawn from their particular interpretations of faith and law.

If we determine that certain jihadist terror groups accept a very short time horizon in their plan for follow-on attacks to 9/11, our response to their planned aggressions and materialized expectations will have to be correspondingly swift. If, on the other hand, it would seem that this time horizon is substantially longer, America's defensive response could reasonably be more patient and less urgent. The exact duration of this enemy time horizon will always be determined by the terrorists' own idea of divine expectation.

It must be our main task, therefore, to identify and understand this idea, a task that would also affect the way in which we decide the increasingly critical trade-off between civil liberties and public safety.

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