Certainly if an insurgency is driven by resistance to Western-supported despotism one would be right to revisit the policy of supporting despots. We found ourselves in that position with a depressing regularity during the Cold War, but that paradigm is not necessarily applicable in every circumstance.
In Iraq and Afghanistan the "insurgencies" (using the term loosely) are not driven by resistance to Western-supported despotism but by a desire to take advantage of a power vacuum left when Western governments removed despots. The Western supported governments in both cases are widely perceived as ineffectual and vulnerable and likely to collapse as soon as Western support is withdrawn, leaving the prize open for whoever has the means to seize it. Western support is perceived (probably accurately) as being unsustainable over the long haul, so the "insurgents" try to erode that support and gain position to take power when it is withdrawn.
AQ, for its own part, may have had its roots in resistance to foreign-supported government and foreign occupation of Afghanistan, but the power in question was not Western. AQ's continuing campaign is based less on resistance to Western-supported despotism than on a desire to impose a despotism more conducive to AQ's goals.
It is in some quarters fashionable to attribute all that happens in the world (at least all that involves violence) to a response to Western actions. In some ways it would be lovely if this were true: if everything everyone did was a response to our actions, we could easily control the responses by modifying our own actions. The world, alas, is a bit more complicated than that, and the non-West is not simply a reflexive responder to Western stimuli. There are people out there with their own agendas and they have both the will and the capacity to proactively pursue those agendas, for their own purposes and quite apart from any knee-jerk response.
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