When fighting insurgents, victory is outlasting them. We don't have to be there to do the fighting, but as long as our enemies are killed and the guys we're backing don't lose, that's winning. It's a lot like Indian-fighting - our forebears fought the Indians for centuries, almost until the dawn of the 20th century, before armed clashes finally ended.
The Brits like to cite the Malayan Emergency (1945-1979) as an instance of a well-executed campaign where British troops showed our guys (later in Vietnam) how counter-insurgency ought to be done. In reality, British participation in the campaign (using a combo of British draftees and regular troops) as a primary combatant lasted 15 years, and British advisers stayed for another couple of decades, into the late 1970's, along with some amount of British military aid. All told, the counter-insurgency campaign lasted almost 35 years, until the Chinese Communists ended their funding, training and supply program for the Malayan Communist Party.
That's the nature of these things - they take decades of whack-a-mole until the dead-enders give up (usually when their funding dries up). For instance, the Colombians have been knocking off leftist guerrillas for almost 50 years, since 1964, and FARC is still alive and kicking.
If Clinton hasn’t forced Colombia to a “peace settlement” with FARC, which consisted of its handing over huge interior territories to the guerrillas, they’d be gone by now. After Clinton left office, fighting resumed in Colombia - or should I say continued, because the guerrillas had been attacking from their Clinton guaranteed safe havens all along. Finally the government was successful, since the guerrillas had no popular support and once the people felt safe, they resisted them and it was clear they were not going to make any headway.
The leaders were aged, most of the important ones had been killed, and all that was left were those colonies in the jungle, mostly made up of people kidnapped by FARC as children to be “guerrilla soldiers.” The latter are being resettled and reintegrated into normal life.
So without Clinton’s breath of air, the guerrillas would probably have been overcome at least 20 years earlier.
Incidentally, Obama has obviously been encouraging FARC, or what’s left of it, because suddenly a couple of new Marxist FARC leaders have emerged, demanding that they be allowed to participate in the political process...and that they be given large tracts of land again.
Normally, the leaders of reconciled groups - such as the paramilitaries that fought the guerrillas - are not allowed to be politically active, since Latin America has seen way too many people like Chavez, who had been imprisoned rather then killed after an earlier attempt at a Marxist takeover, released in a moment of foolish trust on the part of the government, and then came back to be a rabble rouser and eventually take over and destroy the legitimate government and economy of VZ.
And don’t forget the time when they had Chavez under arrest at the airport for his autogolpe, and he was released at the last moment, without any doubt by US intervention. Bush was president at that time, but State was full of its usual career leftists and Bush always did whatever they told him to do. Chavez went on to be the destabilizing, destructive dictator that he was, abundantly encouraged by Obama, and left behind a ruined country.
The US is playing its usual dishonorable part in giving air to these people, be they Marxist or Islamist, and turning over the populations that trusted us to a guerrilla that we have empowered.