I've written two posts that might be of some help to you. One is for "What has characterized past, successful counterinsurgency operations?" and the other one is a comparison between the US failure in Vietnam and the British success in Malaya which is usually seen as the textbook example of how to do things right.

Sorry, we don't allow throughout history questions. These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.