David, My point that I am trying to convey, is that the fundamental strategic framework for these types of conflicts is rooted in human nature, and therefore largely the same. It made little difference to the people of India what British intentions were in different eras any more than it matters to the people of Los Angeles in this TV series. It is the simple fact of a foreign power occupying either physically, or even virtually through policy, that creates a presumptive resistance effect.
British "COIN" was designed to suppress this effect while they had the power to do so, but as British power became diffused over broad holdings and British technology (steam transport by sea and rail, telegraph, literacy) shifted relative power to connected and evolving populations, it forced Britain over time shift from a colonial system of control to a much more influence-based approach with the Commonwealth. The US only captured the shift in military tactics. Not that we did not see the strategic shift rooted in policy - we just believe that what we offer is so good, and that what we oppose is so bad, that our efforts will not trigger this effect, or that when it does we can suppress the symptoms.
This is the danger of buying in too completely to the idea of "American Exceptionalism."
With your long history in law enforcement, you appreciate full well the dangers of assuming that when entering a home on a domestic violence call that the very wife or child one is saving from some drunken husband's abuse, will not launch their own resistance insurgency against the officers as they work to subdue or arrest the husband. A family is a microcosm of a state, so the same factors of human nature apply.
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