My favourite book on the topic is Brig Richard Clutterbuck's "
The Long, Long War; Counterinsurgency in Malaya and Vietnam" published back in 1966.
As I recall it was a gift from and older, much more senior officer who was, probably, tired of my questions about the nature of counter-insurgency (a subject about which he had more than just a passing familiarity). Many, many of us were fascinated with what was happening in Viet Nam in the mid 1960s but we had too few experienced Canadian officers to guide us.
I am not happy with the notion that
Malaya = Viet Nam or even than
Malaya ≈ Viet Nam; they were both insurgencies but, there, especially after the French left with their tails between their legs, most similarities ended. That being said, how one "sees" an insurgency (top down or bottom up) matters, and I believe that the Brits, from Templar on down, understood what they really meant by "winning hearts and minds." Clutterbuck, for example, gives special emphasis to the role of the (native) village police constable as the very beating heart of a successful COIN campaign and he explains why the Army's job is to support and protect that constable ~ not the other way 'round. I'm far less convinced that "hearts and minds" was ever anything for than a slogan, to be repeated mindlessly, to e.g. Maxwell Taylor and William Westmorland.
At the very top, at the US president/UK prime minister level, I believe that John F Kennedy was more interested in the use of power than in the fate of Viet Nam or in America's interests in Asia. In London, however, Clement Atlee (1945-51) and Winston Churchill (1951-55) had many other more difficult issues than an insurgency in a far distant colony and they let their career civil servants, e.g. Sir Robert Thompson, and generals, e.g. Briggs and Templar, to sort things out ... the central government contented itself with supporting them, politically and logistically, as best it could. That may have been more good luck than good management but, I believe, it was
a the key difference in the two campaigns.
A second fundamental difference, in my opinion, was in the nature of the two
proconsuls: I remain convinced that Maxwell Taylor was, at best, a second rate general who just happened to have "good" political connections and a keen sense of self promotion while Gerald Templar was a solid, albeit unspectacular officer who a) inherited the basics of a good plan from Briggs; b) got GREAT strategic and policy guidance from Thompson and c) understood the very nature of that particular insurgency, which is to say that he actually understood and even somewhat sympathized with the legitimate grievances of the Malay-Chinese.
My :2c: the 1960s were long, long ago but 'The Long, Long War' is still worth a read.