Would it be unbecoming, a week into the war, to ask when it will all be over? Probably so.

Patience is among the greatest of martial virtues, and no one at the moment can measure the obstinacy of the enemy. A better question would be this: When the war is over at last, how will we know?

It’s a question that isn’t often asked but should be. For one thing, invoking the war is fast becoming a conversation-stopper in Washington an all-purpose explanation, like a father’s exasperated “Because I say so” in response to his child’s incessant “Why?”

Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, is beginning to sound a bit like Dad. In a typical exchange, he was asked to explain the president’s decision to severely curtail congressional intelligence briefings a decision later reversed. Fleischer’s reply: “Our nation is now at war, and the rules have changed.” End of discussion.

Ashcroft, too

Attorney General John Ashcroft can do a pretty reliable Dad impression too, especially when he plumps for his bill to give law enforcement new anti-terrorism powers. He has objected specifically to “sunset” provisions that would let the new powers lapse after two years unless Congress renews them.

“No on can guarantee that terrorism will sunset in two years,” Ashcroft said. “Our laws need to reflect the new war.”

The most obvious problem here is that we are not, technically, “at war.” War is a condition that exists between sovereign states after one or the other has declared it to exist. No such declaration has been made, needless to say, and the U.S. makes a distinction between the sovereign state of Afghanistan and the Taliban regime that rules it. In the current conflict, the term “war” is being used metaphorically and promiscuously.

This makes it impossible to say when our metaphorical war will end, and, more to the point, when it will no longer be invoked to justify extraordinary measures. “They’ve got a major definitional problem,” says Gary Schmidt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century, a foreign policy think tank. “Most wars are over when you plant the flag in the other guy’s capital. But if the enemy is global terrorism, you can’t really declare victory because you don’t know when you’ve achieved it.”

The confusion doesn’t stop there. To judge by its public pronouncements, the administration has grown uncertain as to what the aim of the war is whether the enemy is Osama bin Laden, or the “global terrorism” of which bin Laden is a particularly virulent manifestation.

From the start, and especially in his much-praised speech to Congress on Sept. 20, President Bush defined the war’s mission in the most expansive terms. “Our war on terror,” he said, “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” Counted among the enemy, he said, is “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism.” Two weeks later, the bombs started falling on Afghanistan.

Scaling back

Yet the war’s mission seems to shrink with every bounce of rubble. On Sunday, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage announced that the focus is not global terrorism but bin Laden and his Afghanistan network.

“If after solving this problem” of bin Laden, Armitage said, “the coalition felt it was necessary to go after terrorist groups in other countries, this would be a matter for the coalition to discuss among themselves.”

Armitage was echoing the sentiments of other officials involved in our war on terror, including Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, who told the Financial Times that the campaign involves Afghanistan alone.

This quick scaling back of war aims is striking. What the president launched as a global campaign, presumably lasting many years and ranging across continents, now looks more like a manhunt that will begin and end in Afghanistan. And any expansion of it, according to Armitage, will be subject to the veto of a coalition that includes countries, such as Saudi Arabia, that turn a blind eye to terrorism.

James Lindsay, an official on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council now with the Brookings Institution, distinguishes between the “poetry” of Bush’s rhetoric, which rallies the public and allies in a “war on evil,” and the “prose” of administration policy, which makes difficult decisions among less dramatic, and often less appealing, options.

“What you’ll probably end up with is something like the Cold War,” says Lindsay long periods of quiet, covert activity punctuated periodically by the use of force. “We don’t really have a good word for what this is.”

Confusion about the purposes of war is as old as war itself; the ambiguity can even have tactical uses. That leaves us with another question that isn’t often asked but should be: Is the administration’s shifting talk about the aims of its campaign against terror ambiguous by intention, a means of keeping the enemy off balance and our options open, or does it reveal genuine confusion at the heart of our metaphorical war?

Andrew Ferguson is the author of “Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces,” a collection of essays.