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The Malaysian Emergency (1948-1960) is pretty widely regarded as the successful counterinsurgency program. (It also featured little to no external support to the insurgents, who were massively outnumbered by the British. Did I mention that this wasn't an easy problem?) The second insurgency (1968-1989-ish) was largely handled by Malaysia itself, as I understand it, without outside forces.

I was debating the former Yugoslavia, but no one was really interested in rebuilding Yugoslavia; they wanted the region to be quiet and relatively stable. Which it seems to be today and wasn't without the continuing threat of military force from sometime during the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Before you draw lessons from the Philippine-American War, look at the timeline: it officially started when the US took over the management from Spain in ~1899 and ended in like 1913. The (new) Philippine government was created in 1902 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Organic_Act_(1902)) with the cessation of the official war. The US kept a military presence as well as official control until WWII, with apparently a good bit of support from the Filipinos.

The US was very specific about the kind of government it set up in the Philippines and not only didn't leave but stayed and supported the government against the remnants of the insurgency.

If you're interested, I strongly recommend 21st Century Ellis, a (small) collection of articles by Pete Ellis, a Marine officer in the Philippines who went on to be part of WWI and to write the basis of the US Marines' part of the pre-WWII plans against the Japanese Empire. (He drank himself to death while spying on the Japanese and the guy sent to recover his ashes was himself killed in the Kyoto earthquake. It's all very Lovecraftian.) His "Bush Wars" (?) is roughly the basis of US counter insurgency strategy that the US couldn't bother to follow in Afghanistan.




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