Posted by Bob,
I frankly find the excessive reliance on both nation building development on one hand, and ramped up drone strikes on the other as difficult to rationalize.
Not surprisingly I agree with the first part of your statement, but I don't understand why you find the drone strikes against AQ senior leadership in Pakistan hard to rationalize? From my seat they appear to be based on good intelligence and they're having a telling effect on AQ's leadership. I also don't see AQ being able to generate effective messaging countering the drone strikes as they did in the past, do you? I much rather see our Special Forces partnered with Pakistan Security forces tracking down and killing AQ's leadership in Pakistan, but I don't think that is feasible, so why not use the drones

The author wrote,
In Pakistan and Afghanistan today, the terror group lets the local Taliban lead the war effort while its members stay in the shadows.
I found this statement to be somewhat in left field, since AQ doesn't have a choice, if they tried to take over the fight in Afghanistan I suspect the Taliban would kill them.

I don't have strong disagreements with the author's five faces:

The Five Faces he lays out are:
1. The Core group around bin Laden
2. The syndicate of terror networks
3. The regional franchises around the Islamic world
4. The self-starting Jihadists with no formal linkage to AQ, and
5. The idea, the narrative and Ideology of AQ.
2 & 3 are intermingled, so I'm not sure what how he defines the difference between the two, but in fact many of these groups are or aspire to be linked with AQ. The brand name still sells globally among the Islamists. I get your point about some of these movements being nationalist movements, but that is also an over generalization. In PACOM the insurgency in Southern Thailand is still believed to a local issue, and I would argue that the MILF in the S. Philippines is also a local issue, but JI on the other hand have regional goals, they are not nationalists, they're caliphatists. Lashkar e Taiyyba clearly have regional and perhaps larger goals, and the list goes on ad nauseum. I think in many cases, just as during the cold war there are elements of both (nationalism and a foreign/global ideological piece). Every case needs to be studied independently to assess the underlying causes of the conflict, but I think it is clear in some cases there are regional franchises that envision a caliphate supported by external powers that has little or nothing to do with nationalistic goals. That doesn't mean they won't develop their own strategy and nuanced supporting ideology that needs to be addressed (versus a generic response globally), but they're still tied to the larger global movement.

4 & 5 are also intermingled, self starting individuals (at least the ones the author cited) were inspired by AQ ideology promoted by the likes of Awlaqi through his influencial use of the internet. You usually don't self starting Jihadists without someone promoting the underlying ideology.

In short I agree we do conflate issues, but it would be also be wrong to ignore the connections when they "actually" exist.