By my reckoning, history suggests that at the end of the day there are only three ways to successfully counter an insurgency.
The most obvious technique is that referred to rather disparagingly by T. E. Lawrence and set out in the previous post: suffocate the spark of resistance under the sheer weight of massive military occupation. Estimates vary, but the experience suggests that effective suffocation requires a ratio of counter insurgent soldiers to units of local population somewhere in the range of 1:10 to 1:100 or more, depending on the severity of the resistance encountered. For example, troop requirements in 2004 during the second battle for Fallujah, Iraq would have been on the high side of this scale, while in rural Malaysia, even at the height of the emergency in the mid-to-late 1950s, they would have been much lower.