Tom Kean gets it. Or at least most of it.

He’s chairman of the national commission studying the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and he grasps how crucial it is to understand and suppress terrorism’s root causes instead of simply trying to destroy the terrorists.

“To defeat and destroy our enemy,” he said recently, “we must understand more than the crimes it already committed. We must understand what drives and motivates it, the source of its power, the resources at its command, its internal strengths and weaknesses.”

Exactly. I have only one quibble with Kean. He’s right that for our own protection we may need to “destroy” terrorists, but our goal – no matter how unrealistic or idealistic it sounds – should be to change their thinking and, thus, their behavior. That’s the only way we’ll be safe in the long run.

It’s hard to focus on that task when we’re ducking bullets or suicide bombers. Our immediate task must be to stop people trying to kill us. But if we don’t ultimately change the reasoning (or lack of it) that causes people to use terrorism, we’ll never be free of terrorists.

That’s why Kean’s admonition to “understand what drives and motivates” religious extremists is so compelling.

The sad fact is that we often fail to get at the root causes of our problems, even simple ones. We swat mosquitoes instead of draining water from the old tire in the yard where they breed. We build more prisons to warehouse criminals instead of attacking the causes of crime – which often means the run-amok illegal drug trade.

Even though discovering and uprooting the factors that breed terrorism will be long, difficult, complex, frustrating work, it must be done.

First, it will require that we not look for a simple or single answer. There is none. The history of religious violence shows that many factors motivate people to adopt destructive means. Just as all crime is not the result of poverty, so all terrorism is not the result of political grievances.

Any list of modern terrorism’s causes will go far beyond that to include distorted religious teachings, the failure to educate young people well and broadly, perceptions of injustice, the manipulations of political and religious leaders, the paucity of fundamental human rights and freedoms in the countries producing most of the terrorists, a failure to view every human being as precious and irreplaceable and the longing to be perceived as heroic in a noble cause.

But even that list is not exhaustive. And each cause I’ve listed can be unpacked to reveal countless variations and subsets of additional causes.

This complexity, however, is often so frustrating to Americans that from time to time it’s possible still to hear people who have given up trying to understand it all and whose solution is something like this: “Let’s just bomb them back to the stone age.”

A far more effective approach to ridding the world of terrorism would bring together military, political, religious, psychological, economic, educational and other experts to share their insights about what motivates people to commit acts outside the boundaries of rational, civilized behavior.

Once the problem is analyzed and solutions proposed, of course, the hard work begins. Helping people find better options than terrorism will require a long-term strategy that takes their hopes and dreams seriously but sets clear limits on the kinds of behavior civilization can tolerate.

But eliminating terrorism also will require institutions through which political and social change can occur peacefully. Well, isn’t that what governments are supposed to do? Yes, but in many countries the oppressive nature of the government drains citizens of hope and leaves them vulnerable to arguments that terrorism is the only way to get anyone’s attention.

I wish I were more confident that Americans were ready to do more than unleash our military on terrorists and on the states that support them. Tom Kean understands why that is an incomplete solution, but I’m not sure how many of the rest of us do.

Bill Tammeus is an editorial page columnist for The Kansas City Star.