We need less Chemo and Surgery and more "Voom."

[Dayuhan]

Another term for "jihad against the foreign invader" is resistance insurgency.

That would be insurgency against a foreign invader in your own country. Fighting in or funding insurgency in in another country is perhaps something different.

We must evolve to the world we live in today. This is the essence of "Voom."

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "voom", but if anyone expects anything to pop out of a hat and clean up all the mess they are sadly mistaken. I don't see any quick or clean solution to this.

Of course we must evolve. We are evolving. So is everyone else, including our antagonists. Evolution isn't going to provide any absolute answer or any quick fix; it is a slow and messy process that must be continuously refined. The question now is not whether to evolve or not to evolve, but what direction evolution should take and how best to pursue the selected direction.

In the Middle East I think in many countries and among many populaces we have a virtual form of foreign "occupation" going on. The West post-WWI, and the US post-WWII have applied a mix of physical and virtual occupation by policy; shaping governance in ways that suited those foreign governments and that left the populaces of the region powerless and irrelevant. When there was a greater threat, in the form of a Soviet desire to replace that Western influence with their own, those populaces generally tolerated that external influence. After all, they had tolerated the Ottomans for several hundred years.

But once that Soviet threat faded, and once the empowering effects of modern information tools connected and empowered these many diverse populaces in unprecedented ways, the people began to move on long suppressed resentments. AQ formed to leverage that latent energy toward their own ends, and employed those same information tools to show that a fairly small non-state group could conduct UW just like, or even better than, large powerful states such as Great Britain, Russia and the US.

This I think is largely a speculative construct, and I don't see much real evidence to support it. AQ and its predecessor organizations have had considerable success in drawing recruits and funding to fight direct foreign military occupation of Muslim nations, forst by the Soviet Union and then by the US. Without such occupation they rapidly lose relevance and support. I see no evidence at all to suggest that people who travel to fight in faraway insurgencies or send money to support those insurgencies are doing that to change the pattern of governance in their own countries.

Now, if one is that foreign power and wants to exercise complete dominion over some place and people, one must simply wage war and crush the people. It works. But, if on the other hand one simply wants to have influence and ensure flow of critical resources and keeping major sea lanes open, then one would be foolish to wage war. The other way to make a resistance go away is to remove the proverbial thorn from the lion's paw. This is a problem of policy. Not the Ends of policy, but rather the Ways and Means.

Depends on what you mean by the thorn in the lion's paw. If you mean the lasting irritant of large scale US military presence in Muslim countries, I agree. If you think the thorn in the lion's paw is the way Muslim countries are governed... well, that's certainly a thorn but it's not our thorn and trying to mess with it is only going to make matters worse.