I think the American "pacification" of resistance groups in the early 20th-century Philippines, i.e. the Philippine-American War and the Huk rebellion, are generally considered to be examples of the US military's more successful counterinsurgency programs.

The Philippine-American War, a guerrilla war fought in the jungles of Southeast Asia, has been much compared to the war in Vietnam, with the crucial distinction that the war in the Philippines resulted in US colonial subjugation of (a good chunk of) the archipelago, while the war in Vietnam failed to meet its goal of curtailing Communist influence in Asia. Glenn May attributed this to several factors:

1. Unlike the NVA and Viet Cong, President Emilio Aguinaldo was slow to adopt guerrilla tactics and lost crucial time when he could have overwhelmed the Americans. The Vietnamese had many more years of experience fighting wars of resistance against colonizers.
2. Infighting within the ethnically diverse officer corps of the Philippine revolutionary army.
3. The "lukewarm" support from the Filipino peasant masses, who were supposed to be involved in a revolution led by the 10% indigenous landowning elite. In contrast, the NVA practiced a relatively aggressive land redistribution program aimed at the Vietnamese peasantry.
4. Failure of the Philippine government to secure support from foreign powers. Vietnam received much support from China and the Soviet Union, which also meant that US intervention entailed much higher stakes.
5. The archipelagic nature of the country which made a US naval blockade all the more effective.
6. More general popular sentiment within the American people for the war in the Philippines as compared to Vietnam.

In particular, John M. Gates and Brian Linn argue that compared to Vietnam, the US in the Philippines pursued a more palpable "policy of attraction". In addition to brutal methods of rebel suppression like hamletting and torture, American colonial authorities also built schools, roads, sewage systems and limited land reform programs in order to win over the Filipino masses. In contrast, the Philippine revolutionary army was much burdened by the needs of waging war and could not always afford the same niceties of Western colonial powers. Gates argues that this "policy of attraction" was not as visible in Vietnam, where the expanded capacities of industrial warfare made a similar "hearts and minds" campaign untenable among the people.

However, it is worth noting that the Americans themselves imposed a rather arbitrary end to the Philippine "insurrection" with the Brigandage Act of 1902, which classified all further resistance to American rule as criminal offenses rather than acts of war. Rebels with nationalist aspirations like Macario Sakay and Papa Isio survived well into the end of the 1900s before being hanged as common bandits. Nor does this include the unrest in the southern Moro provinces, which necessitated military rule in the region until 1913.

The Huk rebellion was a leftist peasant uprising in Central Luzon in the 1940s-1950s, led by remnants of the Filipino guerrillas that resisted the Japanese occupation there. As the Philippine agricultural sector opened up to the US market, traditional patron-client bonds between landlords and tenant farmers began to break down as landlords focused more on profit and less on providing for the welfare of their tenants as per cultural tradition.

Peasant unrest started in the 1930s but was briefly interrupted by the Japanese invasion of the Philippines during World War II, during which Huk guerrillas made uneasilly alliances with US-backed forces. After the war, the unrest devolved into all-out war in 1946. In these initial years in the 1940s, the Roxas and Quirino administrations were brutal in their attempts to suppress guerrilla activities, with the Philippine armed forces and their civilian guard detachments indiscriminately hamletting and bombing areas with civilian populations. Despite all this, the atrocities only emboldened more peasants to join the Huks, with the movement reaching its peak in 1949-1951.

President Ramon Magsaysay was credited particularly with the ending of the rebellion, which should be attributed in no small part to US assistance and the "unconventional tactics" of CIA officer Colonel Edward Lansdale. Factors include:

1. Magsaysay's reformation of the Philippine military, which involved the "professionalization" of the rank and file via the disbandment of abusive civilian guard detachments and the provision of benefits to competent soldiery, as well as instruction in the "unconventional tactics" of the Huk rebels. This meant that the Philippine military's use of force now did not have to alienate the civilian population.
2. Magsaysay's efforts to reform the agricultural sector. In order to bypass the influence of local political bosses, he set up more agricultural assistance programs like rural banks that gave credit to tenant farmers. He also initiated a "settler program" that relocated thousands of landless peasants to the southern wilderness of Mindanao (which would unfortunately run into some roadblocks in the 1970s). Though some commentators have denounced these reforms as being mostly cosmetic, the psychological impact of them, augmented by a CIA-funded propaganda campaign, could not be understated among the peasantry.
3. Lansdale's effective use of psychological warfare, which he would go on to also practice in Vietnam. The anti-communist campaign in the countryside was now fought with leaflet droppings, propaganda movies, and instruction in schools all denouncing the evils of communism and the virtues of Magsaysay's agricultural reforms. Lansdale also took advantage of the local peasants' superstitions, and was famously responsible for the "mutilation" of Huk rebels in such a way that the wounds resembled that which were supposedly inflicted by folkloric vampires.

All of these efforts led to losses of the Huk's mass base and served to worsen a general war-weariness among its fighters. Training in socialist "theory" was also very poor among the rank-and-file: many Huk rebels were not even against the very existence of landlords, they just wanted to be treated fairly by them! These weaknesses culminated in Luis Taruc's surrender to President Magsaysay in 1954, after which the remaining Huk forces largely fell into a state of banditry. However, this in no way meant that the agrarian issues that the general Philippine peasantry faced came to an end.

It's also important to note that the proliferation of arms in rebel-ridden countries is of course less attributable to state-espoused freedoms like the US 2nd amendment and more on the ineptness of the state to fully enforce its own authority throughout the country, especially in places like the mountains of Afghanistan or the scattered islands of the Philippines. It is not uncommon for those areas to smuggle in their own guns, steal them from government armories or simply make them themselves.

And in response to that quote, of course revolutions have failed all the time, it's just that you mostly hear of these people as "terrorists" and "fanatics" rather than "freedom fighters" as espoused by an educational curriculum.

Sources:

• Why the United States Won the Philippine-American War, 1899-1902 by Glenn May
• The Philippines and Vietnam: Another False Analogy by John M. Gates
• The Philippine War, 1899-1902 by Brian McAllister Linn
• The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines by Benjamin Kerkvliet
• Hukbalahap Insurrection: Case Study of a Successful Anti-Insurgency Operation in the Philippines, 1946-1955 by Major Lawrence M. Greenberg
• State and Society in the Philippines (2nd. ed.) by P. Abinales and D. Amoroso
• In The Midst of Wars: An American's Mission to Southeast Asia by Edward G. Lansdale