In 2006, after NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps took over as ISAF headquarters, an ink spot strategy was seriously discussed and half-way implemented. It was classic COIN stuff, just as described in the piece that kicked off this thread, and we planners pushed it hard.

Here is why it was never fully adopted:
1. The Afghans didn't like it. It meant abandoning some areas, and that just upset too many special interests within the Afghan mafiocracy that passed for a national government.
2. The Americans didn't like it. It meant abandoning the operational design for victory they had already worked out and were halfway through implementing. They assumed it was just a fig-leaf strategy which would allow the NATO allies to hide behind the wire; they much preferred chasing insurgents around RC-East, building roads to nowhere, and pursuing a quasi-French Indochina program of placing outposts in regions of no particular worth.
3. Many NATO allies didn't like it. It meant, in several cases, moving out of their selected provinces - which they thought would look like defeat and reflect badly on them - into areas they had avoided in the first place because of high levels of violence. They much preferred to pursue their individual 'wars' using the tactics they thought best.

Here is why it probably wouldn't have worked anyway:
1. Oil spots need to be dropped in either areas of high enemy activity, or in places of exceptional and/or inherent worth. There are none of the latter in Afghanistan, and we did not have the combat power to do the former.
2. To sustain themselves, the insurgents in Afghanistan do not really need prolonged access to the population; they simply need to be able to strike at it. You can't prevent suicide attacks through heightened security, you can only reduce their effectiveness, and effectiveness isn't really what the insurgents are after. Activity begets support in this strange corner of the planet, and oil spots simply give the bad guys more room to maneuver.
3. It would have been a free pass to the drug lords.
4. Oil spot theory presupposes active and effective development of the secured terrain. In 2006/7/8, that was not a realistic prospect. Except for road-building, pretty much all development efforts during this period were abject failures.

Bottom line is that absent unity of command or unity of effort or adequate resources, pretty much any strategy will do as well as any other.