Yes.
The Romans beat the Hebrews in the Bar Kokhba revolt.
To defeat an insurgency, you can follow the Roman recipe.
interesting footnote: one area of trouble they ran into was in what is now Afghanistan with the precursors to the Taliban. Used the the same tactics listed above, worked.
As far as i can tell in history, its the only time anyone has actually established anything remotely like peace in that place, for any length of time.
The Spanish Civil War comes to mind.
You will note that survival required treating the press as the combatants they are.
Chechnya, Carthage, Constantinople.
Yes.
But we don’t have the guts to win that way.
As a Scripture Scholar who dabbles in History via Biblical History, I would think the question a difficult one to answer, especially if one is looking for odds rather than a single example, for two reasons:
1) History tends to be written by the victors, and so unsuccessful insurgencies would be more easily submerged in the mists of time.
2) Definition of terms: what constitutes an insurgency (the Scots under Bonny Prince Charlie?); and what constitutes success—both for the insurgents and for the ones putting down the insurgency (the Irish rebelled multiple times against the English, and for a long time England held on to the whole of Ireland, and England still has a foothold).
The Jews rebelled multiple times against the Romans. There is now a Jewish state—whether there is still a Roman state is more debatable.
It is not a matter of counter-insurgency, it is a matter of what our goal is and whether we are to use the tools at hand to carry it out. We cannot defeat Islamic terrorists, for example, is we still see Islam as a “religion of peace”. We need to draw a line and simply kill the enemy. Give no quarter to them. We cannot allow them to gain a foothold, to undermine us. Afghanistan is a problem, Pakistan is bigger one. We need to be consistent, kill the enemy, stop nation building. Once the enemy is dead, if there is anyone left, maybe we can help this rebuild. It worked in Japan and Germany, it can work today.
Britain, Malaysia, 1959.
Not without a brutality that most Americans would not accept, and not without massive occupation and without installing a brutal puppet ruler.
The Council on Foreign Relations formula for counter-insurgency will never work.
The real question is how to stop the invasion of America by hostile foreigners?
This seems to have a change from Nation Building to “Let’s go kill those M/Fs that killed our friends.” Not that it’s a bad thing though.
The British empire put down many insurgencies. They were quite good at it.
Short answer is yes. But you have to be prepared (willing and able) to kill them all, including woman and children).
Before you say we could never do that, look back at WWII. We were carpet bombing cities. We were in fact willing and able to kill civilians, men, women and children. As harsh as this was, it ended the war.
Since then we have fought wars in half measures trying to spare the “innocents”. The harsh truth is there are no innocents when two nations go to war. The men fighting on the front line would not be able to fight without the support of the people behind them.
This is also true in a guerrilla war. Without the people’s support they would not be able to fight for long.
To win a war you need to break the will of your enemy to resist. One way to do that is by killing their families.
Terrorism will continue as long as they know their families are safe from reprisals.
Neutron bomb.
There were peasant rebellions across Europe in 1849. Almost universal.
Yes, China did on several occasions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rebellions_in_China
Yes, the British put down Sean Fein in the early 20th with counter-insurgency. It’s not a matter of tactics, it’s a matter of will:
“Horror has a face. And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared.
They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces, seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile, a pile of little arms. And I remember, I, I, I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized, like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond, a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God, the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.
And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres, these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love, but they had the strength, the strength, to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment, without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.”
No one has ever really tamed Afghanistan and no one will.
We should never have tried.
A Cherokee proverb goes “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then its finished; no matter how brave its warriors or how strong their weapons”. Ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu noted, in "The Art of War", that victory happens when you have destroyed the enemy's willingness to fight you. The enemy generally loses their will to fight when their mothers, wives, and daughters beg them to make it all stop.
To name just 3. Truth is, most insurgencies fail. The problem is, how do you define "victory" and "defeat". Most wars don't end with the Red Army marching into Berlin or an atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki. Most wars end inconclusively when one side or the other reaches a point of exhaustion but after the other side has expended so much of their resources that they just can't put the other guys away. So, they cut a deal. Maybe it holds, usually it doesn't.
The problem with Afghanistan is that they have a martial history stretching back to Alexander the Great - and probably for a lot longer before that. The other problem is, it's one of the most worthless places on earth. Lousy climate, no really valuable mineral resources. All they've ever contributed to the world is a lot of tribal violence. The only real way I can see to fix things is to wipe out the current population and resettle the land with Swiss immigrants but I don't see that as likely.