Just some food for thought, Van mentioned "AQ is more like a petri dish for a highly contagious disease." Made me think I know I 've heard this before, I don't know who mentioned it but the idea of trans-national insurgency as a virus or more to the point being sold along the same lines as viral marketing. I've included below a summary of viral marketing as a guide for discussion. When you read it replace viral marketing with viral insurgency and reread it, I found that interesting: (enjoy)

"you have to admire the virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus don't even have to mate -- he just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration:

1
11
1111
11111111
1111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 11111111111111

In a few short generations, a virus population can explode.

Viral Marketing Defined:
What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

The Classic Hotmail.com Example
The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: "Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com" and,
Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
Who see the message,
Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.
Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy
Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

Gives away products or services
Provides for effortless transfer to others
Scales easily from small to very large
Exploits common motivations and behaviors
Utilizes existing communication networks
Takes advantage of others' resources