So, what, pray tell, is a "terrorist" organization?
Terrorism is, after all, merely a tactic. Many insurgents use terrorist tactics. Many governments (to include our own) use terrorist tactics. Many non-state actors with broad political agendas, such as AQ, use terrorist tactics.
Frankly it is a label that bundles all manner of actors based upon a particular tactical approach. I don't find that very helpful, as it does not create a category that frames or suggests a particular family of solution to apply.
Which leads to "counter-terrorism," which equally is a little more than a commitment to seek to disrupt, defeat, deny, etc those individuals and organizations that employ terrorist tactics. It is very symptomatic in nature, and as such does not much consider WHY some organization or individual is acting out, or why they have come to a position where they believe terrorist tactics are their best hope for achieving their goals.
AQ is actually more accurately a non-state political action group that operates outside the rule of law to conduct unconventional warfare to leverage the insurgent populaces of a wide range of primarily Muslim states, employing both guerrilla warfare and terrorist tactics, to force change upon the governments of those states and their foreign allies.
This cannot be well addressed by "counter-terrorism." Nor can this be well addressed by the slightly broader concept of "combating-terrorism." What I have long argued is that we we really need is a much broader, more holistic construct of "counter-unconventional warfare." This gets us past an excessive focus on the tactics employed, and instead forces us to think in the context of the actual operations being waged. Much of our jousting in the "3rd world" with the Soviets during the Cold War was essentially counter UW. We did not fly drones to Moscow and attempt to kill soviet leaders with missiles. But we fly drones in the sovereign airspace of many countries where AQ and nationalist insurgents operate and attempt to kill them. I find this odd at best.
But the energy source of any successful UW campaign is an insurgent populace. One cannot go to a stable, satisfied populace and create an insurgency. One can, however, go to place where such conditions are strong, but suppressed, and employ ideology, motivation, arms, leadership, funding, etc to move such a populace to action.
Che Guevara did not understand this fundamental truth of UW. He wanted to ignite a flame of insurgency that would spread and envelope all of South America. He looked at his map and picked a country in the middle of the continent and decided to light his fire there. So he went to Bolivia. But Bolivia had already had a revolution and much of the latent insurgent energy of the populace there was already released. He found few recruits and no sanctuary among the people. He was in short order hunted down and killed. He failed because he did not understand UW and the necessity for conditions of insurgency to fuel any such movement. AQ does not make that mistake, or perhaps they do not understand either, but the fact is there are so many populaces across so many countries in the Middle East with high conditions of insurgency that they cannot hardly help but finding fertile ground for their operations.
If not AQ, it would be someone else. They exploit the opportunity, they do not create the opportunity. I suspect this is why AQ has never resonated nearly as well among the Muslim populaces of the Asia-Pacific Region as they have in those areas that have not had the political revolutions yet such as have occurred there. As you well know, things are not perfect in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Cambodia, or the Philippines - but these people and these nations have already thrown off the major aspects of external, illegitimate manipulation and are working toward their own destiny. Small groups and small numbers of individuals are open to help from groups such as AQ, but nearly so much as in the greater Middle East.
This is political. There are simple, fundamental aspects of human nature that provide a framework for understanding these problems. Each is unique in its details, but all are similar in their fundamentals.
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