The other new factor is the rise of non-state actors like AQ, that can now wage unconventional warfare to join and enflame disparate local causes like only state actors could previously. They also are able to do this relatively immune from the time tested DIME tools of statecraft to control such actions among fellow states. A dynamic leader with a powerful ideology like Hitler needed to first attain control of a state in order to have significant impact. Today attaining a state creates an Achilles heel and is to be avoided by such. Bin Laden knows this full well and has no desire to soon abandon the "legal sanctuary" of his current status.
My two years in Paksitan in the mid-1960s fits this topic pretty well, as I picked up the additional duty of managing RON of walking wounded from South Vietnam immediately after the Gulf of Tonkin...and I had been "in the area or arena if you like" prior to the Gulf of Tonkin to have a young man's impression of things to come over there.

Bob, when the whole free world's intel system is jointly wrong, not by collusion to decieve but due to wrong info leading to wrong suppositions, referring to Iraq, this does not undo the continuium fact that ever since the first Gulf of Tonkin [which I volunteered back on duty for and ran the entire airlift for the East Coast, based out of Charleston AFB, but covering the coast, up and down, for that war]..the "ideology or theory" of containment, isolation, and sanctions failed miserably and was not working...in fact by Saddam and his grizzly gang, together with various Western business people in Europe...found ways and means to get richer off of the UN and associated organizations well intentioned by embezzeled morally and literally...programs to provide medicine and food for the ordinary Iraqi citizens.

My today, 2009, friends in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and here in the US, I refer here to my Muslim friends, both Shia and Sunnis, who are both over there and have family here..some of whom are in my home town here in sunny Alabama...tell me, not I them...that the radical Islamic terrorists are succeeding in "kidnapping Islam."

They tell me, but I do agree, that the updated concept of the Umah is stateless and being construed by the Taliban and al Qaida to be the "ideological" state of mind desired to seek to take over the minds and religious freedoms of the world, starting with other Muslims, but extending to all others of differeing faiths, or for that matter, even those of no faith.

You emphasis is to seek a mold, updated, that stamps in common outcomes from the past down to today. I disagree, just as I disagree with the two generals featured in another part of SWJ who complain about folks using high faluting words, confusing terminology which they think confuses young officers and NCOs, but as much, my view, seems to confuse them!

Chaos and mayhem have always been what that says, and is a piece of the puzzle in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Whether it is Musharraf, Zardari, or whoever comes next in Pakistan...and a deposed ex-Chief Justice of the Pakistan Supreme Court has no business under their, Pakistani, Constitution which I know a little about...trying to be the top dog and dictator over the non-sectarian PPP elected President of Pakistan.

The Shariff brothers, one of whom was the PM of Paksitan whom Musharraf deposed, are as crooked as it gets and ex-PM Shariff has trucked with the Taliban, and al Qaida, heavily and supported/enabled them both when he was PM, which is part of why Musharraf overthrew him (Shariff).

The Uman as a terrorist adopted and distorted concept is stateless, seeks to draw in or force in, more correctly said, into radical Sunni/Wahabbi driven Islam, the masses of the world, if they but could.

The boogey man? Not yet, but if pacifist ideas took hold here in the West, if we don't keep insisting that Pakistan permanently install peacekeeping forces inside the NWFP and related areas of Pakistan to back up and directly in most cases enforce civil law and order...instead of, my studied opinion, Zardari and/or the flag ranks and ISI sending troops from where they are and were most needed to senseless postings on the Indian border...allegedly over Mumbai terrorism which Pakistan has made clear was instigated, planned, funded, and driven from within Pakistan to inside India... then there is no rational hope.

No, the US cannot police the world, literally, even with our NATO allies. But we can back and support when they can be trusted [and as often as not the ISI and Pak flag rangs are not trustworthy but support radical Islamic terrorists such as the Taliban and even al Qaida) the duly elected non-sectarian government of President Zardari over that of the ex-Chief Justice of the Pakistani Supreme Court, Mr. Justice Chowdry...who would use the court system to run yet another dictatorship of Pakistan...all over again!

It is a mess, but we cannot turn our backs on all this, but we cannot fix it ourselves, either.

So Bob, you have your quasi pacifist influence views and I have my hawkish views, but we both are looking at as you so correctly wrote of...stateless religious terrorism which is bent on worldwide trouble making if we don't keep them pinned in where they are until some sort of resolution in maybe....generations to come...can be realized.

I would never trust these religious terrorist thugs with nukes, and I can tell you it makes my native Pakistani friends, both Shia and Sunnis, loose sleep at night as that prospect grows daily with the chaos inside Pakistan.

So Bob, as during WWII, when actual pacifists refused combat duty but were useful in support non-combat roles, your ideology and ideas have a place in the puzzle, as do mine focused on what I know to be the cold reality of terrorism in the name of Islam. No Bob, all Muslims are not terrorists, but even one such Islamic terrorist is one too many today with nuclear weaponry control and use at stake inside Pakistan...and the possibility of tactical nukes being used elsewhere...fill in the blanks...that makes me loose sleep!