On that I will have to disagree with you on. I read Chin Peng memoir "My side of history" and several other books available in Malaysia on it, along with chatting to some vets over there. The Brits did 3 things right in the beginning, they identified this as a problem for the police and let them run it. They early on picked the right men for the job of leading the effort with minimal idiot promoting. They also zeroed in on the drivers and weaknesses of the Communist Terrorists. A few things, the CT first leader was a French Vietnamese double agent, succeeded by Chin Peng. The Briggs plan isolated the CT from their main support which were the Chinese squatters/labours. The Brits were able to strong arm the Malay Sultans into giving out land to the Chinese (Most had fled China civil wars), this took away the majority of the support that the CT's had and most of their platform. A few other bits:
Chin Peng, admits that Beijing had a plan to dominate SE Asia (domino theory) But were pissed the locals started a revolt when conditions were not right.
UK captured CT's, interrogated them and then released them back into the bush with the threat that they would leak that they were a double agent, which forced hem to be a double agent. After awhile, the CT's were killing more of their own than the Brits for a bit.
The CT's only lasted as long as they did, thanks to being able to seek refuge in Thailand, later when the Thais pushed them out, they could not sustain the Britis ops tempo.
The Brits developed the concept of using SF to hunt the CT's and the army mainly as a blocking force. The Brits built good relations with the Indigenous tribes who had no love for the CT's
Near the end the CT's had lost the ability to communicate with each other, with the resulting breakdown of command and control, thanks to British efforts
The Brits wisely gave them an honourable exist strategy, helped by the WWII Brit liaison officer who had fought with Chin Peng against the Japanese to start the final negotiations (there were previous attempts).
As for the current mess, there was only so much the Brits could do to sort out Malaysia politically, with the 3 main ethnic groups always mistrustful of each other. The only way to solve that would have been mass expulsion and population movement.