Bill,
Your three examples make my point. In each of those cases the government defeated the insurgent, but in so doing only served to suppress the symptoms of insurgency for a short time, while at the same time making the conditions of insurgency within the populations those insurgent groups emerged from worse.
I realize we call that "COIN" but it really isn't. It is counterinsurgent, not counterinsurgency. We could more accurately call it "SOIN" - suppression of insurgency. There are times and places and situations where SOIN makes sense. If you are a colonial power whose primary concern is extraction of resources at lowest possible cost, and the population is resisting your presence, and in revolution against your client regime, then by all means, suppress the symptoms and get on with your colonial profit making.
This is not what the US's mission is these days, but yet the SOIN that so many think of as COIN is derived from the lessons learned from those type of operations.
How would the US benefit in the long term from helping some client regime suppress the symptoms of insurgency in their country?? This is what creates and thickens the vectors of transnational terrorism back to the US. This is what validates and enhances the UW operations of AQ and now ISIL as well.
We have to stop thinking about insurgency as if we were still a colonial power. Until we can do that we are doomed to fail. It is not the fault of our tactics, though bad tactics do not help. It is the fault of our poor strategic understanding of the problem and our poor strategy for approaching these problems in general.
Once one shifts to thinking about these types of conflicts in the proper framework it becomes clear why legitimacy is the central issue, not a side issue. A side issue for SOIN, but central for COIN. One cannot create legitimacy in some other government, and one cannot grant legitimacy to some other government. The more one interferes between a population and their government, the less legitimacy that government has. SOIN operations are typically a deathblow to legitimacy.
The reality for the US is that our interests are better served the less we interfere in these foreign revolutions. I was at a meeting with several successful business executives and a couple members of the state department. For state all corruption is bad. One exec commented that for many places, corruption is how taxation occurs where there is no effective legal taxation. The State reps had a fit. Likewise, insurgency is often how democracy occurs where there is no effective legal means to shape governance. That truth makes people have a fit as well. But still truth all the same.
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