A request...in order to buttress or clarify your historical point, can you NAME the counterinsurgencies that had applied all of the correct elements of modern counterinsurgency warfare strategy, yet failed because they did not kill all of the people involved in the insurgency and move in to occupy their land?
I ask, because unless you CONTROL for those other elements that could have caused a counterinsurgency to fail, and unless you relate it to MODERN counterinsurgency warfare strategy, which General Petraeus wrote the book on, your point won’t win the day with me...and I daresay others.
Your question has shows that you did not understand what I said. I don’t know how to be any more clear. Their was a communist uprising in Malaya (a British colony), and the British put down the insurgency. This has been held up as an example of the only successful counter-insurgency in modern times. While THEY DID NOT KILL EVERY LAST PERSON, as in the type of counter-insurgencies of the past, they still used the type of brutality that we could never get away with these days. Such as aggressively putting people in internment camps. Do you see us doing that in Iraq?
This is not complicated like you are trying to make it, I assume to blur the issue. It’s quite straight forward and supports my position that as insurgencies are very hard to put down without the use of the type of brutality we will never use in this day and age. The fact that this is the one example always held up that did work, just adds to the point that counter-insurgencies have historically not worked or been sustainable without extreme measures being taken.
You are quite hung up on the “kill every last person” quote and I simply was explaining the way battles were fought long ago, not advocating that as the solution.