Comments on: Not Enough Pashto Speakers but Pashto is Not Enough

By: Tlaloc

Tlaloc — Tue, 05 May 2009 02:43:45 +0000

We spend more on guns than everyone else in the world...

Doesn't that mean we can just make them speak 'Merican?

By: steve

steve — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:36:21 +0000

Here is a link from a CPT. Carl Thompson on preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.

http://easterncampaign.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/winninginafghanistan1.pdf

The culture there is totally alien for us. We are sometimes contracting Taliban to build for us. Being completely dependent on native interpreters in such a country means just giving away money.

After finishing my enlisted time in the mid 70's, I took extra courses in ME history and Islam. It has been pretty clear for a long time, IMHO, that the ME and over to Pakistan has been our future problem area (Latin America closing fast). How could we not have developed an extensive corps of interpreters? You can add armor to a Humvee or build MRAP's pretty quickly. Interpreters take a bit. We have been there for 7 years. What gives? Protect the population we cant even speak with? Nuts.

There is a group of service members who have been impressed enough with the importance of our actions in the ME to actually learn Arabic. I have great respect and admiration for those people. We need some people with the same commitment to learn the languages of the areas where we can see we will remain involved. BTW, this does not all need to rely upon DoD. State should be doing the same.

Steve

By: Bernard Finel

Bernard Finel — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:42:57 +0000

An analyst I respect makes the point that we should seek less cultural awareness and more awareness of culture. I wonder if the same concept would work with language study -- which I think is essentially used as a surrogate for a more culturally attune approach to pursuing our interests.

By: Boyd

Boyd — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:28:55 +0000

Triumph must be channeling one of my former shipmates who said something along the lines of, "The nerve of these people! We come all the way over here to live in their country and defend them from the damn Commies, and they don't have the common decency to learn our language!"

It came out surprisingly clear when he said it, considering his tongue was firmly planted deep into his cheek at the time.

By: Dave Schuler

Dave Schuler — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:34:48 +0000

Unfortunately, they don't all speak Pashto, either, James. Indeed, more speak Afghan Persian than speak Pashto. There are more than 30 languages spoken in Afghanistan. I return to my earlier point: we're never going to have speakers with high levels of fluency in every language in the world on the shelf in case of need.

Isn't English the closest thing to a lingua franca in Afghanistan?

The bottom line is that we're going to need to find a method of relying on native speakers with some command of English rather than rolling our own from English native speakers.

By: James Joyner

James Joyner — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:18:18 +0000

Why is it incumbant upon us to learn the language to the degree called for in James piece, particularly when there are doubtless a number of English speaking... and even western educated people within the Afghan government, already?

The problem is that the Afgan "government" in Kabul doesn't actually run Afghanistan. Tribal leaders do. And most of 'em don't speak English.

By: Bithead

Bithead — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:06:21 +0000

Triumph's point seems more reasonable than he wants to make it, and in combo with Shculer's comment, raises a logical question:

Why is it incumbant upon us to learn the language to the degree called for in James piece, particularly when there are doubtless a number of English speaking... and even western educated people within the Afghan government, already?

By: Triumph

Triumph — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:44:03 +0000

Pashto is a crap language born of savagery. Make them either learn English or retreat into their spiderholes and get out of our way.

By: Dave Schuler

Dave Schuler — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:04:15 +0000

Additionally, in some languages, e.g. Arabic, Chinese, the “dialects” are very diverse, in some cases not mutually intelligible. In the case of Pashto I believe there are something like a dozen dialects, some of which are quite diverse. I have no idea of how diverse.

John Burgess could, no doubt, comment more authoritatively than I on the subject of Arabic.

But the idea that we're going to have people on tap who are Level 5 fluency in every obscure dialect in the world is absurd.

By: Boyd

Boyd — Mon, 04 May 2009 11:30:52 +0000

Before you even get to that point, a more fundamental problem is the government's unwillingness to commit the resources necessary to achieve language proficiency in the more difficult language for native English speakers.

While my experience is solely with the US Navy, based on what I've seen over the years, the shortcomings I experienced there seem to apply to the federal government as a whole.

Here's the issue: the desired fluency cannot be achieved by anyone other than those linguistic superstars you mentioned without spending a great deal of time "living in the language" with native speakers. This is especially difficult with south Asian and Middle Eastern languages. Even though Arabic, as the most severe example, is used in countries extending from Morocco across North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia, Arabic in Morocco is significantly different from Arabic in Saudi Arabia.

Pashto has its own additional difficulties, though. In order to attain true fluency, students of the language are going to need to spend a considerable amount of time in Afghanistan. Finding language-facile folks willing to do that, even in the military, ain't gonna be easy.