Let me describe what I mean by counter-insurgency. There is a lot of confusion in the electorate, particularly, about the terminology we use to describe missions. The way I teach it at RMC is this.
On the spectrum of what we're dealing with, there is interpositionary peacekeeping, which would be like Suez in 1956, where we have two countries and we have, by political agreement, a UN force that's lightly armed separating them. It is interpositionary.
The next phase you have is a stabilization operation, which we got into mostly in the 1990s. Unfortunately, people call stabilization “peacekeeping”, so it confuses everybody. Stabilization operations tend to be within a country that's fragmented and where there aren't necessarily representative governments. You have to use different types of techniques and higher levels of force than you would in interpositionary peacekeeping.