Steve,

Actually, I don't think we figured out what to do with those insurgencies very well at all. I think it is the belief that we have that causes us so much difficulty with the current crop. Certainly much study has taken place, yet we'll still list the Philippines or Algeria as multiple insurgencies, with a mix of failures and successes; rather than recognizing instead what looks to me like a long train of efforts by government to address the symptoms of a problem by suppressing the organizations that emerge from it; only to find what you are calling "resurgency."

I too believe in resurgency, but we associate different factors to why it happens. I believe it happens because the root cause of insurgency is government. When government is out of touch with various segments of its populace in certain fundamental human nature (rather than Western nature) ways, conditions of insurgency exist that are easily exploited by external or internal actors. This continues until such time as those conditions are addressed.

This is why when an insurgent "wins" it does not automatically end the "insurgency." The successful insurgent becomes immediately a struggling counterinsurgent until such time as the conditions of insurgency are addressed. Those who fail to address those conditions suffer the same fate that they dished out to their predecessor. Most insurgents have no interest in bringing good governance to the people, they merely take advantage of poor governance to put themselves into the power position. The American experience is unique in that regard. But for the moral stand of one man, America would likely have become a Kingdom and suffered an even rougher transition to stability than the one we took.

The big difference in insurgency today are the tools of globalization. These do not change the nature of insurgency, IMO, but they do certainly change the impact of insurgency, the resilliance of insurgency and the TTPs that are apt to work.

One could contribute to suppressing an insurgency in the 1950s by "separating the insurgent from the populace," today such separation is virtually impossible. Not only are they connected to the populace, but they are connected to the world. In essence, government can no longer ignore the people and suppress their voice. Governments must actually answer to their people.

This same factor has also rendered obsolete the tried and true policy TTP of "friendly dictators". Now these populace are able to reach out and touch the external parties that enable their governments to act with impunity. The US still has far too many friendly dictators on the books, and the fact that we are attacked most by the populaces of our allies rather than the populaces of our enemies is a powerful metric that we would be wise to quit ignoring. Attacking the foreign enabler government is often easier than attacking the domestic impune government. This makes AQ's UW efforts fairly easy. A shift in focus from helping governments suppress their populaces to one of helping populaces address their governments is more in line with our principles as a nation and would take away much of the impetus behind international acts of terrorism that exists today.

Even the current administration is careful not to call out these allies when speaking about civil rights abuses. The hypocrisy is deafening in its silence.