- Do nothing
- Use drones
- Use conventional weapons which, he argues, would have more collateral damage
- Put troops on the ground and be perceived as an invader.
So either you should argue that these are not the options or you should argue that he did not pick the right one.
- Employ soft power / carrots instead of sticks such as foreign aid and literacy education.
- Take actions that make people hate you less instead of more.
- Equip/arrange for the locals or neighbours to do your dirty work.
- Get a UN vote saying whatever you want to do.
- Arm the government, conditional on a transition to democracy over the course of ten years.
- Employ targeted bombings only on terrorist training camps, not on weddings.
- Convince, bribe or threaten local cultural and religious leaders to guide their followers away from whatever you want them away from.
- Divide the country along race, religious or class grounds and install a minority government that serves your interests.
- Place bounties on the heads of people you want killed and increase the payout until the free market takes care of things for you.
- Just let them take care of their own internal political issues and wait for the terrorists to reach the US or one of its allies before whacking them.
- Increase employment rates and workloads so people are too busy/tired to devote attention to trying to destroy america.
- Free bread / circuses / fast food / TV.
- Drugs in the water supply.
- Nuke the whole place as a warning to others.
- Adopt a realistic foreign policy that admits the inevitability of civilian deaths, occasional bad apples engaging in torture and executing prisoners etc. and just agree to monitor and set realistic targets regarding the number of civilian deaths etc.
- Do something low impact and ineffective and let the next president deal with it.
FWIW, the correct response to terrorism is to do nothing militarily, and treat it as a crime problem with an intelligence aspect nationally. People in faraway lands have little capability to do the US any harm.
Its hard to have a permanent war if you actually keep reducing the number of enemies.
Putting troops on the ground would be worse than doing nothing, but still better, less cowardly and maybe less error-prone than bombing from drones.
Using conventional weapons would actually be the worst option.
So out of (his own set of) four, he picked the 3rd worse.
Is it really so terrible not to bomb wedding parties?
Even then I feel that more than Obama or any other politicians or military official it is the general public to blame. The public wants democracy but does not understand that democracy does not work out of the box. One needs to get involved to make it work properly. It is a good system but needs fixes. The problem with democracy is it treats my stupidity same as your intelligence and my apathy same as your concern. And as long as people like me hold majority there is not much others can do.