At the risk of asking a really silly question, can we list off the successful counterinsurgency operations in history? I got to thinking about this because I frequently hear about how the Brits are the pros at counterinsurgency. And they certainly fought quite a few of them -- and on many continents. They're the pros. On the other hand, pretty much by definition, they lost every one.

We often hear about the Brits boffo counterinsurgency in Malaysia. But are the British still in Malaysia? Yes, it was a communist insurgency, which they defeated. But they also left, which presumably sapped the nationalist dimension from equation.

A few others -- First Intifada, Algeria, Vietnam. None of these went so well for the counter-insurgent power. Not in the final analysis. On the other hand, I guess you could say that some of the ones in Central America in the 1980s were successful -- at least in the very narrow sense that the great power sponsoring the counter-insurgencies got a policy outcome they were satisfied with.

Now, the rub in analyzing this question, I think, is that often these vicious wars end in a political settlement of some sort. But very frequently it's because the counter-insurgent power gives in. Most of the Brits' counter-insurgencies ended in this way in as much as the ultimate driver of the insurgency was the demand for independence, though this was often interwoven with ideological impulses.

In Ireland and Palestine, it would probably be better to say that the battle became enough of a stalemate that both sides became receptive to levels of compromise they would never have been open to at the outset.

There's yet another example -- and these I think of in Latin America -- where counter-insurgencies are successful, but definitely not on the Petraeus model. On the contrary, in many of these cases the government just goes in and kills so many people -- rebels and civilians -- that the whole thing peters out. We'll call this the genocide model.

This post was meant to start a discussion, not advance a theory. And we seem to be having this debate on the basis of a highly theoretical model of how a successful counter-insurgency works, rather than taking a more historical view. But putting all the examples together, the one loose pattern I can see is the distinction between ideologically based insurgencies and ones fought against foreign occupation, with the former often being susceptible to successful counter-insurgency and the latter much less frequently so.

And this brings us back to the question of which sort we're fighting in Iraq. I suspect the people who support our policy in Iraq would say instinctively that it's ideological. Those who oppose it would say it's basically an insurgency aimed at a foreign occupation -- though relatedly it's also one in which a ruling group wants to reclaim its dominant position.

Your thoughts?