Why Home-grown Terrorists?

Home-grown terrorists aren't much of a surprise. This happens when people substitute their own self-interests with an ideology and abandon allegiance to a support system. We've had the American communists way back to the '30's through the '60's, some of whom spied for Russia. We've had the German-American Bund before WW2, and later the American Nazi Party. These are examples of groups who choose an ideology over their own national interests. Now we have terrorists of different stripes but mostly Islamic types. They reject police protection, fire protection, all the government support network that they get here, for a nebulous attraction to some terrorists who can't do anything for them.

Here we go again with Yemen

Are we going to commit armed forces to an invasion of Yemen now that we've "discovered" that terrorist activities are originating there? Using this logic (the "Afghanistan Logic"), how many s**tbird countries are we willing to invade? Somehow, our leaders have decided that trying to kill off the source of this terrorism where it originates is the best policy to protect us here within our own borders. Maybe a serious reevaluation of this logic is called for. It's possible that it would be more effective to actively and throroughly police our own borders (sea, land and air) than using the needle in a haystack approach trying to root terrorists out of remote caves over hundreds of thousands of square miles. Even when we squash terrorist activity in a limited area, the terrorists draw back until we leave, then return and resume their activities (proven to be the case in Afghanistan).

In addition to policing our own borders effectively, we could use intelligence to make surgical strikes on known targets of high value, much like Israel did on Iraqi nuclear reactors. That ended Iraq's quest for the A-bomb. By sending large, conventional forces to flail and flounder around in the wilderness while the terrorists look on and laugh is expensive, stupid and ineffective.