> It's less common (although not entirely unheard of) if the bombing is a terrorist attack. But if, as you suggest, that target is infrastructure
A terrorist attack’s first objective is to cause terror, not to kill people. Thus warning in advance is also effective to instill terror. And separating terrorism from bombing infrastructure is a weird dichotomy...
We need to deepen our critical thinking a bit and evolve past “bomb = terrorism” naïveté.
If causing terror were a hallmark of a terrorist attack, wouldn't every attack be a terror attack (even, for example, mass school shootings or shootings like the Las Vegas shooting, etc.)
Certainly there can be a mixture of both tactical and terrorist motives in an attack... 9/11 was seemingly meant to both instill fear and to hobble the U.S. financial system.
But what made it a terrorist attack, as opposed to an act of revolutionary war, is that it was intended to be very public and to frighten the populace.
And yes, mass shootings are considered terrorist attacks for precisely this reason, they’re meant to instill fear.
Consider: murdering a witness to stop them testifying against you. That has a primarily tactical objective. Not terrorism.
Killing someone who owes you a debt, on the other hand, is terrorism because it serves no tactical purpose (you definitely won’t get your money) it is only meant to instill fear in your other debtors.
There is certainly a lot of gray area here, but the that doesn’t render the underlying definitions pointless.
I’d be curious to hear your definition of terrorism though, as it seems to differ from mine!
Terminology these days is less about meaning and more about political pressure. I'm sure this qualifies under group 2.
In the case of this bombing, then, I think calling the cuprits "terrorists" would be incorrect since they were attempting to take down infrastructure.