A few points relative to this...

First, in the midst of all this enthusiasm for insurgency study, COIN, etc, it might be worth recalling that our core antagonist in the fight of the day, AQ, is not an insurgency at all.

Second, we need to note a fundamental difference between the COIN situations we're in now and those of the Cold War. During the Cold War we intervened to assist "allies" (often rather dubious in nature) that were threatened by insurgency. Insurgencies arose against existing Governments, and we responded. In today's cases, we initiated the situations through our own decisions to occupy territory and install governments. We did not intervene to support allies, we intervened to remove governments we didn't like, and subsequently created our own "allies". In one case, Iraq, this effort was completely peripheral to the core conflict with AQ.

The point of all this is simply that today's COIN efforts were not thrust upon us, they were consequences of our own choices. I don't think it's necessarily true that COIN must dominate our immediate military future, or that dealing with AQ requires us to manage insurgencies. We have the ability to control the amount of COINage in our lives by making different decisions.

I think the French theorists missed the point when they characterized the insurgencies they faced as "Maoist", and if we accept that characterization we miss an important lesson. Our great mistake in managing the Cold War in the developing world lay in allowing our opponents to seize the moral high ground of opposition to decaying empires and oafish post-colonial dictators, while we took the role of trying to rescue sinking ships, many of which were simply unsalvageable. The Communists didn't create the insurgencies, they simply exploited and harnessed a perfectly natural desire to remove foreign conquerors and incompetent dictators, something we could and should have done ourselves, instead of swimming against an overpowering historical tide.

The lesson we need to learn from that doesn't revolve around population-centric tactics, it revolves around choosing interventions wisely and avoiding situations that will harness us to governments that cannot stand, but which we cannot allow to fall.

I could go on at length, but to sum up...

Are there lessons to be learned from Cold War COIN that are relevant today? Yes.

Are all lessons deduced from Cold War COIN relevant today? No.