Posted by Bob

All true, yet that in no way undermines my proposition that conditions of insurgency grow when some distinct segment of the overall governed populace comes to perceive the current system as intolerable. Their are many reasons why men fight (most tied to youth and testosterone), but when societies grow restless in this way the most common drivers appear to be those more closely tied to the top of Maslow's hierarchy.
They do not perceive the governance to be acting in a manner they deem as appropriate
And perhaps most importantly, they do not perceive themselves to have trusted, certain, and legal means consistent with their culture to affect governance driving the perceptions listed above.

I bundle all of this up as "poor governance"
Bob,

Your argument is borderline irrational, but most importantly it is completely irrelevant to the issue at hand. First, many in our government have been pushing the same view for years and our current strategy is based on reforming governments (it isn't working). Second, you tend to identify every insurgent as legitimate and automatically default to finding the State government illegitimate which is a serious bias on your part. Poor governance really? When a minority of Islamists want to impose Shari'a law upon all and the government fights to defeat their attempt to subject the people to their extreme views this is poor governance? Really? A government fights against a communist insurgency which only has 15% of populace supporting it, and their goal is suppress the people much more than the current government, yet any effort by the government to defeat them is illegitimate, because only the insurgents are legitimate? Really?

Government's have every right and obligation to defend the status quo. In some situations we support them, in others we support the insurgents (based on our interests), and in most cases we remain neutral (or should). As Dayuhan correctly points out we're not going to fix other people's government's and even if we did AQ would still survive, so as a core of our strategy to defend the U.S. fixing governments to defeat AQ won't work and it is too expensive to sustain, so it isn't feasible to begin with.

While I don't concur with Dayuhan's assessment of AQ, it is still very much alive and it is growing in many parts of the world, his overall approach to dealing with it is one of the most level headed I have seen (it is not the approach we're following now, we're following Bob's approach of trying to fix foreign governments and it isn't work well for us)

Posted by Dayuhan

1. Defend effectively. Monitoring, tracking, infiltrating, and disrupting plots won't eliminate the antagonists, but it can minimize their impact, deprive them of high profile success, and isolate them from supporters who want to see results.
2. Attack effectively. Find and eliminate the key individuals on the operational and the funding/support side by whatever means work.
3. Starve them. Don't occupy territory, don't feed that "expel the infidel from the land of the faithful" narrative. Extended occupations of Muslim territory provide a discrete, specific target for jihadi propaganda and fundraising and should be avoided. We'll never convert the inner circle, they have to be killed, arrested, or driven so far underground that they can't operate. The inner circle can be isolated from their sources of support and recruitment.
Solid points have been ignored since 9/11, but there are at least to categories of starving them. The psychological you address above, and then the financial. They won't conduct effective transnational terrorist attacks without adequate resources.

4. Don't be stupid. There will always someone who will tell us that the cause of all the mess is bad governance in Muslim countries and we can fix the mess by fixing governance in Muslim countries. Trying to do that is just going to get us deeper in the $#!t. It can be argued (though often exaggerated) that the bad governance problem is to some extent something we helped create, but we can't undo the effect of meddling past by meddling again
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The fact that we're pushing to the point of imposing our values on other States and their societies is what is creating the backlash against us in many cases. It provides propaganda for AQ, and for the emergent AQ 2.0 and 3.0 and all their step children. If our goal is to reform the world, that won't be done peacefully or within a budget we can afford.