Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 102

forces, although U.S. Army doctrine warned against
this tendency.25 Yet, we neglected to ask a fundamental
question: Can a police force be considered to function
effectively while most of its members remain illiterate
and it routinely capitalizes on culturally acceptable levels
of corruption, nepotism, and sex discrimination?26
Even if we might entertain such a contentious question, a more important question remains: Would our
police teachers even recognize such a police force? If not,
could they become intellectually emancipated ignorant
schoolmasters who would encourage the emergence of
some security force that worked differently but better
than what their students currently had?
In the old master model, one cannot teach what
one does not already know, let alone imagine learning
outcomes beyond one’s knowledge and ways of knowing.
The practical result is that in teaching counterinsurgency, the U.S. Army has attempted to impose on Afghan
Security Forces the Western security values and knowledge it assumes are universal. From an epistemological
perspective, U.S. forces teaching counterinsurgency have
not considered aiming for learning objectives that would
fall outside Western society’s boundaries for knowledge of law enforcement; they have taught what they as
teachers could explicate to their students.
This tendency is, unfortunately, supported by Army
counterinsurgency doctrine that goes so far as to recommend that advisors essentially manipulate host-nation
forces into assuming some of the U.S. Army’s ideas are
really their own.27 This is the old master structure of
teaching with explication and distance, and the students
are expected to obey in order to progress.
The Army’s approach might be significantly improved if its doctrine encouraged advisors to incorporate
host-nation ideas in the design of education and training,
to learn as teachers, and to reverse the prevailing old
master dynamic. From the Afghan perspective—where
their resources, traditions, and current capabilities
generate different conditions for, say, policing requirements—could they move toward a novel outcome for
Afghan security forces, one that the emancipated students might discover?28
In such a recast role, soldier-teachers would need to
shed their roles as explicators who could only teach what
they already knew, and the students would need to explore and discover a more effective Afghan policing and
securing form that would function best in the Afghan
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counterinsurgent environment. Neither the students
nor the teachers would know at first precisely how such
a security force would develop; thus, they would become
ignorant counterinsurgents, moving along different
paths of self-discovery and education.

How Illiterate Mountain Villagers
Might Teach Us
Defenders of the old master teaching model might
protest some of its points are overstated. One notable
objection is that all teachers learn from their students, as
many guides and studies for advisors often mention in
their introduction.29 However, there is a difference between saying “this Yemeni policeman taught me so much
about friendship,” and “this African warlord turned what
I thought I knew about counterinsurgency upside down,
and I now question our original approach entirely.”
Most teachers learn from their students when
they use the explication method, just as teachers in an
elementary school or a war college gain life experiences
with class after class of students. However, the master-student structure remains rigid, and only the teacher
controls how knowledge is discovered, interpreted,
measured, and processed.30 While a particularly difficult
student often forces the teacher to discover new teaching
techniques, the student never wrests control of the old
master model and so remains on the receiving end of the
knowledge transfer. The way of teaching and the knowledge to be explicated remain controlled by the teacher.
What could an illiterate native of a mountain village
with no modern technology possibly teach the modern
counterinsurgent trainer? Could the villager teach beyond the sharing of experiences during training? Could
the foreign counterinsurgent teacher learn from him?
Success would require a shared willingness to adopt an
intellectually emancipated approach. Both the counterinsurgent and the villager would need to recognize their
dependence on the traditional teacher-student structure.
However, this is no easy task from either perspective.

Ignorant Counterinsurgency and
Security Force Assistance
If ignorant counterinsurgents would approach
teaching by acknowledging that teachers and students
are equals, that knowledge needs to be discovered before
it can be learned, and that students can learn on their
own as well as with a teacher, the counterinsurgents
March-April 2015  MILITARY REVIEW