Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 101

IGNORANT COUNTERINSURGENT

(Photo by Sgt. Margaret Taylor, 129th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment)

A soldier from 5th Battalion, 25th Field Artillery Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, observes the firing of a
D-30 122 mm howitzer by Afghan National Army soldiers from 4th Kandak, 3rd Brigade, 201st Corps, as an Afghan soldier covers his ears
during certification exercises at Forward Operating Base Tagab, Kapisa Province, Afghanistan, 5 September 2013.

of counterinsurgency and their students would need
to assume that all normal individuals are of equal
intelligence—that anyone can learn anything with the
will and desire to do so. Teachers of counterinsurgency
would need to reject the hierarchical teacher-student
structure and consider how to intellectually emancipate
their students.21 What is perhaps most important is that
the students, and especially the teachers, would have to
acknowledge that a certain amount of ignorance is not
only acceptable but also necessary. Teachers should not
think they have to know everything students will learn
or every way they will learn.

The Value of Admitting Ignorance
Let us imagine that Jacotot had been tasked to
teach his students a slang street-French, which would
have been constantly changing in lexicon and structure faster than he or his students might be able to
learn it. The language to be taught would have been
transforming even as they were learning it. How
would he teach it? This metaphor illustrates a significant reason why teaching counterinsurgency is so difficult. The ill-structured environments characteristic
of counterinsurgencies are unique and evolving. No
counterinsurgency is likely to be identical to another.
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2015

As such, each demands a tailored approach that cannot necessarily be cataloged, templated, and used as a
model for training.
Recognizing the certainty of such uncertainty, ignorant counterinsurgents must self-emancipate intellectually by appreciating that the future condition of the
counterinsurgent force will likely be something they
could not teach—even if they could predict it. In this
manner, “we progress toward even greater knowledge of
our own ignorance.”22 At times, our doctrine on military
advising seems to imply this very thing, although typically it is cast in the overarching context of a dominant old
master approach.23
The U.S. Army and the coalition forces approached
teaching and training the Afghan police force by trying
to cleanse them of several key values the Army found
undesirable in law enforcement, such as illiteracy,
corruption, nepotism, and sexism. Instead, the Army
and the coalition emphasized values they favored. For
example, the Afghan National Security Forces (Army,
Air Force, and police) were instructed on the values of
integrity, honor, duty, country, courage, service, loyalty, respect, and God (Allah) that closely mirrored the
U.S. Army values.24 The coalition attempted to build
them into a security force similar to coalition member
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