Pashto Language Ability
A colleague points me to this reporting from Gareth Porter back in April:
But according to an official at the State Department’s Bureau of Human Resources, the United States has turned out a total of only 18 Foreign Service officers who can speak Pashto, and only two of them are now serving in Afghanistan – both apparently in Kabul.
The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California trains roughly 30 to 40 military personnel in Pashto each year, according to media relations officer Brian Lamar, most of whom are enlisted men in military intelligence.
I don’t think this necessarily needs to hobble our ability to achieve anything useful in Afghanistan. But I do think it illustrates that manipulating Afghan politics is not likely to be America’s strong suit. Foreign politicians usually understand how to manipulate US domestic politics much better than our leaders understand how to manipulate their domestic politics. We have a lot of strengths as a nation, but that sort of thing is not one of them.
21 Responses to “Pashto Language Ability”
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November 2nd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
the United States has turned out a total of only 18 Foreign Service officers who can speak Pashto, and only two of them are now serving in Afghanistan
Q: What do you call five Arabic speakers in the State Department?
A: The consular section in Mexico City.
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:21 pm
The whole point of empire is that your subjects speak YOUR language, not the other way around.
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:40 pm
I don’t know, we seem to get our puppets installed just fine. The problem seems to be getting them to even stand on their own, let alone do what we want.
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Sometimes, knowing the language can get you into trouble. My roommate speaks Khmer better than most Cambodians. He lived in Cambodia for five years working for NGOs. He’d walk into a bar in rural Cambodia and start speaking Khmer with the locals. Within ten minutes, the local police chief would invariably walk in, sit down across from him, and start questioning who he was and why he was there. The assumption was that any white guy who speaks Khmer that well had to be CIA, and they really don’t like CIA spooks. My roommate would eventually convince the police chief that he’s really there to build schools and medical clinics. But then police chief would ask my roommate to give his nephew a job. And my roommate pretty much had to hire him.
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:48 pm
“We must have a second round,” … “If we don’t do that, we’ll be insulting democracy”–Hamid Karzai
No runoff, as Abdullah Abdullah withdrew because he couldn’t trust a broken election process. Hillary and John Kerry look foolish, democracy insulted…
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Wouldn’t it be nice, though, to have people informing our decisions who have a more than superficial understanding of Afghan culture and politics? People who can look at the Afghan political situation from an Afghan perspective? If you’re relying on an Afghan translator you are still relying on western political concepts and terminology to describe a fundamentally non-western culture. I think the emphasis on “corruption” is often an example where we project our own standards on cultures where
November 2nd, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Wouldn’t it be nice, though, to have people informing our decisions who have a more than superficial understanding of Afghan culture and politics? People who can look at the Afghan political situation from an Afghan perspective? If you’re relying on an translator you are still relying on western political concepts and terminology to describe a fundamentally non-western culture.
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Overall, though, it’s more valuable to speak Dari. And Dari is close enough to Farsi (further than various Anglophone dialects, but closer than Spanish and Italian, from what I understand) that the pool is quite a bit larger (but could always be bigger)
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Understanding Pashtun culture is not at all easy for Americans, even if they speak the language. One of my reader writes:
Here are some Pukhtun (=Pashtun = Pathan = Pushtun) proverbs (from “Generosity and Jealousy: The Swat Pukhtun of Northern Pakistan,” Charles Lindholm, Columbia University Press, 1982.)
On war and peace (p. 31)
The Pukhtun is never at peace, except when he is at war.
On women (p. 113)
Women belong in the house or in the grave.
Women have no noses. They will eat s***.
One’s own mother and sister are disgusting.
On family life (nepotism and neposchism) (p. 161)
Where there is the sound of a blow, there is respect.
When the floodwaters reach your chin, put your son beneath your feet.
On friendship (p. 240)
God, grant me a true friend who, without urging, will show me his love.
Curiously, the Pukhtun have a strongly idealized notion of friendship. They say that it is honorable for a man to lie for a true friend, even with his hand on the Koran (which means that the liar goes to Hell!). While other Pukhtun are potential allies, and often must be avenged for the sake of honor, they cannot be true friends, because the element of rivalry is too strong. The ideal friend is a foreigner, providing he comes as a guest, rather than an enemy. Lindholm, although no sociobiologist, argues that a universal human nature is rearing its head here – the desire for human connection expressing itself in the cult of friendship, in what is otherwise a bitterly individualist and cutthroat culture.
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Winston Churchill fought against the Pashtuns in the 1890s. From his autobiography “My Early Life:”
“Except at harvest time, when self-preservation enjoins a temporary truce, the Pathan tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician, and a theologian. Every large house is a real feudal fortress made, it is true, only of sunbaked clay, but with battlements, turrets, loopholes, flanking towers, drawbridges, etc., complete. Every village has its defense. Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud. The numerous tribes and combination of tribes all have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten and very few debts are left unpaid…
“For the purposes of social life … a most elaborate code of honour has been established and is on the whole faithfully observed. A man who knew it and observed it faultlessly might pass unarmed from one end of the frontier to another. The slightest technical slip would, however, be fatal. The life of the Pathan is thus full of interest…”
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Also, Americans have a hard time grasping the privileged position of homosexuality over heterosexuality in traditional Pashtun culture. The Taliban were able to come to power in the 1990s because two reigning warlords had gotten into a civil war over the favors of a particularly pretty boy.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Also, Americans have a hard time grasping the privileged position of homosexuality over heterosexuality in traditional Pashtun culture. The Taliban were able to come to power in the 1990s because two reigning warlords had gotten into a civil war over the favors of a particularly pretty boy.
Americans have a very hard time grasping the privileged position of homosexuality among any group of warlike men.
Pretty much every group of badass warriors in ancient times had a tradition of homosexuality/pederasty.
And even in times not so ancient, as the Pushtun continue to demonstrate. Churchill might not have ever said that three traditions of the Royal Navy were “Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash”, but it hits pretty close to the truth.
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:25 pm
the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey looks like a nice assignment.
November 2nd, 2009 at 7:31 pm
I know someone who speaks Pashto and Urdu who is now on his second tour of duty with the US Army – in Iraq. He keeps trying to point out to folks that he speaks Pashto and Urdu, not Arabic, and that he might be of a little more added value in Afghanistan. Although, per a Classic Joke at 1, if the US Army really thought he spoke Arabic, maybe he’d be guarding the US consulate in Mexico City right now instead.
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:19 pm
I was comparing how Stalin dominated East-Central Europe with our attempts on domination or influence.
One thing is that he was careful not to kill off all Communists from a given nation (he killed most of the Polish Communist leaders, but well, not all, although some were saved only by being in Polish prisons). Soviet Communists from appropriate background were collected and they got jobs in “puppet regimes”. And, of course, a lot of Soviet just had to learned various languages. (One method to encourage that: being on duty in the middle of Mongolia, with a perspective of moving to less crappy climate and locale. Perhaps US Army should have some tours of duty that would make Afghanistan look positively enticing. Mongolia has basically sub-Arctic climate and is rather short on nightlife).
Admittedly, Russian is more similar to Polish and Czech than English to Pushto, but with Hungarian not so much.
There was elaborate mechanism how to coopt and recruit local elites — Russians were not running day-to-day affairs, even counter-insurgency, which was an issue in Poland, was quickly under local control — with “input” from a few bi-national generals.
Of course, not all Stalin’s method deserve emulation, but the fact is that there are many thousands of American citizens who speak Pushto, both from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Of those, many could be motivated to have a constructive role in their “old country”, and with a modicum of background check, one could find those who would be loyal to US goals too. Well, if we had clear goals: this is another difference with Stalin.
Remember that Soviet domination ended without much glory, but it took decades. We would be most happy with a “temporary” solution that would work for, say, 40 years.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Re: Pretty much every group of badass warriors in ancient times had a tradition of homosexuality/pederasty.
Case in point, Alexander the Great.
Or Yukio Mishima, although in his case he was more of a would-be bad*ss warrior then an actual one. Poor Yukio.
I’m good friends with a gay COngregational minister, and he once told me candidly that in his experience gay men were disproportionately likely to go into the military (and probably would be even more likely if it weren’t for the DADT silliness). Make of that what you will- I’m not qualified to comment on its veracity.
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:06 am
Here’s the acid test: How many U.S. soldiers or Marines died of AIDS in 1982-1992?
Some, but not many.
A volunteer military attracts guys who like to kill people and break things. Those kind of guys generally like girls.
Gays like to fantasize about how lots of men in macho professions are really gay, but the AIDS death rates in the 1980s showed that the old stereotypes are right. For example, a sizable fraction of all professional athletes to die of AIDS were figure skaters (e.g., both Olympic men’s gold medalists from the 1970s).
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:40 am
Eighteen? It’s been eight years, and this is supposed to be a high priority for the US government, and: eighteen. And another two or three hundred soldiers, many of whom are probably no longer serving. That’s pathetic.
Fire the commander of the Defense Language Institute.
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:00 am
Re: A volunteer military attracts guys who like to kill people and break things. Those kind of guys generally like girls.
You are dealing in gross generalities. Even assuming they are true, what about the exceptions to those generalities? They do exist and in a population of 300 million they are not even rare. Why shouldn’t the occasional macho gay guy be able to serve as well? Not to menton those lesbians who do fit their Amazonian stereotype.
November 3rd, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Gays like to fantasize about how lots of men in macho professions are really gay, but the AIDS death rates in the 1980s showed that the old stereotypes are right. For example, a sizable fraction of all professional athletes to die of AIDS were figure skaters (e.g., both Olympic men’s gold medalists from the 1970s).
The US is the very strange exception to the rule.
For some reason, the US has huge problems dealing with the existence of homosexuality. In other countries, it’s considered something that’s distasteful at worst, and acceptable among the political and especially military elites at best.
Here, we have things like Matt Shepard. The only other country that has as nasty a history with homosexuality as the US is the Soviet Union (and Russia today still ain’t pretty). You did *not* want to be gay in the Soviet Union.
We’re not really a warrior culture. Warrior culture has usually been all about the pederasty.
November 3rd, 2009 at 9:31 pm
Re: The only other country that has as nasty a history with homosexuality as the US is the Soviet Union
Um, India? Quite a few African countries, one of which (Uganda) is debating the death penalty for gays? For that matter, China is anything but gay friendly. And the Middle East is not known as a gay paradise either. They hang gays in Iran.