Arab Spring is the moment that the west has been waiting for, but most do not recognize that yet.

The tremendous potential energy of these many populaces in varying stages of suppressed insurgency is what AQ has been leveraging for years with they networked UW campaign. Now that many of these are starting to break from from that suppressed state the time is ripe to make aggressive moves to Out-compete AQ for influence with these movements and to provide the much broader populaces behind such movements a far better advocate to help them negotiate new or better governance with their leaders.

They know AQ offers a bad choice, but when a bad choice is your only choice for confronting a worse situation, what do you do?

The other realization the West needs to come to is that while we cannot "contain" AQ in the FATA, neither should we try to defeat them there either. Better to know where their base of ops is than to send them completely into the shadows. Ideology cannot be contained, and these guys do not need some big patch of real estate to run effective operations.

The final move for greater success is to narrow the aperture tremendously in regard to what we consider to be "AQ." We have allowed a legal process and threat-seeking intel mentality lump all manner of movements under broad categories of "terrorist" or "AQ" that may facilitate capture kill operations, but tremendously hinders other forms of engagement to bring these organizations in from the cold and convert to part of the legal solution. Sure, some deserve the title and the relentless hunting, but most do not and it is a problem.