There is nothing in your #125 that I disagree with. The broader issues that you mention are indeed connected to this, and we should concentrate on them as the opportunity arises.
I never stated that the military operations in Afghanistan would be easy; for my purposes on this thread it was sufficient to note that they are inevitable. The difficulty of the terrain is another argument to do the military part once, and not do repeated retaliatory strikes after each attack.
I am no Johnnie-come-lately to the issues of resource independence and civil defense. I have considered it a legitimate product of resource landowners for which they are seldom compensated by urban users. It is therefore a product that is underinvested and might be particularly valuable near urban areas in a free market of risk-management thus counterbalancing the conversion of resource land to residential use. This idea is touched upon numerous times within my book.