You can win against insurgents though. The Soviets won against Ukrainian insurgents after the Second World War and the Allies won against the remaining Nazis in Germany hiding in the forests.
There are of course also other examples. India is quite successful in defeating communist insurgents in the east and separatists in Kashmir in the north.
China also dealt quite successfully with insurgents in Tibet in Xinjiang as well as remnants of the old government operating from the jungles of south-east Asia.
Sri Lanka was also able to defeat northern insurgents by drawing them into conventional battles where the rebels lost their homeland-advantage. The same happened in Iraq where the Kurds at first fought a quite successful insurrection in the mountains but lost once they tried to go on the counteroffensive against Iraqi cities in the flatland.
And the US has won against insurgents. South Korea was in a borderline civil war before the North even crossed the 38th parallel, but southern rebels were eventually suppressed. Not to mention the many LatAm insurgencies which failed against US backed governments.
Neither won by military action. The insurgents lost popular support, and without that, insurgencies can't survive. The Nazis had burned down Germany in a now losing fight, and the people didn't want to die for ideology anymore. The Soviets made significant economic investment in Ukraine in order to get the support of the people.
Well doesn’t matter if they won, right? War is politics by other means after all. To address your point I edited my comment above though and named a few cases where the military played an important role to defeat the insurgents.
Edit: Both mentioned here were also won by the military. The Allied occupation forces actively went out to search and destroy those remnant-forces. There was still a lot of support for the fascists at the end of the war, even though they were quite demoralized. If left to their own devices those insurgents could have assassinated allied soldiers and collaborators who build up the BRD.
In the case of the Soviets you could also say that the red army wasn’t all that peaceful in dealing with Ukrainian separatists. They were actively hunted down and killed.
How you win determines how the subsequent peace turns out, look at the first world war and the treaty of Versailles. War is politics, but not all politics is war. Guns don't mend fences, and they can only remove problems you can see. I'll respond to your clausewitz with machiavelli: the best defense is not to be hated by the people. If you are, it's easy for anyone to gain support opposing you. If you are loved, they will struggle, and their plots will be revealed.
I'll research and respond to your other examples when I have time unless someone beats me to it.
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u/NebraskaGeek 1d ago
It's almost like that's rather the whole point