A tradeoff between literacy and military effectiveness in Afghan forces?

I’ve been reading a terrific (and massive) new book edited by Lewis Sorley, The Vietnam War: An Assessment by South Vietnam’s Generals, and a passage in it provokes me to return to the issue of the literacy of local security forces. Col. Hoang Ngoc Lung, who had been a senior South Vietnamese intelligence officer, wrote in 1978 that:

Only country people had a natural affinity for night operations. ARVN officers and noncommissioned officers were all urban dwellers. They were chosen for their educational backgrounds; high school graduates were sent to officer candidate schools and junior high school certificate holders to noncommissioned officer schools…Rural peasants almost never had this opportunity. Even most enlisted men in the National Army were not rural peasants but urbanized peasants and worked to had had contacts with the machine age. (Pp. 117-118)

Tom again: Who would you prefer protecting your village while you sleep — someone who grew up in that environment and isn’t afraid to patrol at night, or someone who can read a field manual but wants to be behind closed doors when the sun goes down? It seems to me that who you recruit and how you train them depends a lot on where and what the fight is.