Speaking the Language
To move beyond merely rhetorical question-asking, who is the highest-ranking American official who speaks the languages they use in Afghanistan? Moving quickly down the list, it seems that neither the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, nor the Secretary of State makes the cut. Nothing in the background of Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Robert Blake or Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Colin Kahl (oddly, State and DOD slice up the world differently) suggests that they do. Nor does Richard Holbrooke or Ambassador Karl Eikenberry or General McChrystal (or, for that matter, General Petraeus).
The leading contender that’s been suggested to me is Puneet Talwar, who does Iran-Iraq issues at the NSC and I’m led to believe knows Persian which (going under the name Dari) is used as a lingua franca in Afghanistan. But he works at a different desk. Spencer thinks Vikram Singh, who works for Holbrooke, may be the person I’m looking for.
At any rate, Americans are famously poorly endowed with foreign language ability, and the issue becomes especially acute as our national security policy becomes more-and-more focused on places like Afghanistan and Somalia rather than France and Germany.
21 Responses to “Speaking the Language”
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November 2nd, 2009 at 10:59 am
poorly endowed with foreign language ability
Wrong, presumably we have the same ability, we just don’t have the same need or desire to learn foreign languages. It is a problem of incentives and effort.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:04 am
Eikenberry doesn’t? I thought there was some sort of rule in the foreign service that the ambassador has to speak the language, which is sort of honored in the breach when you send some big campaign donor from the Upper Midwest to be ambassador to Norway, but still, I would have thought they’d keep it up with a post that’s actually important.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:05 am
(oddly, State and DOD slice up the world differently)
DOD seems to prefer to bomb the shit out of it, actually.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:08 am
Maybe we should take the lack of speakers of Dari and Pushtu as a sign of just how peripheral those cultures are to our national interest. You can’t throw a rock in a college town these days without hitting someone who is learning Mandarin.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:09 am
I thought there was some sort of rule in the foreign service that the ambassador has to speak the language, which is sort of honored in the breach when you send some big campaign donor from the Upper Midwest to be ambassador to Norway, but still, I would have thought they’d keep it up with a post that’s actually important.
I know for a fact that Bush’s ambassadors to Germany and French did not speak German or French. So, I think that “rule” is breached quite often.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:09 am
You can’t throw a rock in a college town these days without hitting someone who is learning Mandarin.
…or Arabic
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:12 am
It’s true that we don’t tend to speak foreign languages as readily as people whose countries or regions are more polyglot.
However, while I think it’s probably a significant issue at operational levels, I don’t think it’s important at all that top leaders speak local languages. At that level good bilingual translators should be used, even if the person using one is rather good with the local language. There’s simply too much room for small misunderstandings to have a large impact to rely on someone who is not totally at ease in the local language, which typically requires either many years of study, or growing up speaking it.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:23 am
At any rate, Americans are famously poorly endowed with foreign language ability, and the issue becomes especially acute as our national security policy becomes more-and-more focused on places like Afghanistan and Somalia rather than France and Germany.
Look, it’s simple, all the important people in foreign countries speak English. If they don’t speak English, they’re not important and they can be disregarded or bombed at will, Q.E.D.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:24 am
The significance of learning the local language is less the day-to-day communication, and more the cultural insight and sympathy that comes with the study and experience required. Which, of course, is why we’re suspicious of Americans who can speak these languages.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:24 am
Zalmay Khalilzad spoke the language, despite being a republican
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:05 pm
just dropping by has got it just about right. there is a lot of poli sci literature about how much better foreign ambassadors and lobbyists are at gaming the u.s. political system compared to the u.s.’s ability to do the same to other nations, and this essentially has to do with the u.s.’s status as a hegemon nation. for similar reasons, it is a lot easier for other countries to train people to learn english than it is for the u.s. gov. to employ people with hundreds of different language skills.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Oddly enough, Ambassador Eikenberry speaks Mandarin fluently and I believe he was the highest ranking DOD official to speak Chinese before he retired/became ambassador to Afghanistan.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Re: Maybe we should take the lack of speakers of Dari and Pushtu as a sign of just how peripheral those cultures are to our national interest.
I have no idea about Pashto, but I’ve been told that Persian is a remarkably beautiful language, and that the best Indian poetry (even by non-Muslims) is in the highly Persian-influenced Urdu language. It certainly must be a lot more pleasant sounding then German or French, which have got to be two of the ugliest sounding languages in current existence (though Afrikaans probably beats them for the top spot).
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:59 pm
John Cleese did a public service ad in which he “claimed” that British people didn’t need to learn foreign languages they just needed to speak English louder.
That seems pretty much the way with American politicians and, particularly, policy wonks. They don’t need to learn foreign languages they just need to speak American louder – with bigger guns, bombs and bangs.
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:12 pm
I think the importance of decision makers speaking the language is much exaggerated. An executive with the proper skills can obtain whatever depth of ground-level information he or she wants to obtain. This is like the foolish argument that presidents (or, strangely, only Democratic ones) should defer to the judgment of “commanders in the field,” as if a highly stylized and narrow realm of knowledge should inform policy decisions way outside of that realm. Knowing what monolingual Pashtos want for their country, which like what Americans want for their country may well be inconsistent or even delusional, shouldn’t be the principal factor in US policymaking.
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Hector, buddy, does it really surprise you that Afrikaans would be the ugliest sounding language, considering how ugly Afrikaaner society was?
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:22 pm
[...] and LiarsStimulus jobs nothing more than ‘featherbedding’? – Ed Morrissey, Hot AirSpeaking the language – Matthew YglesiasThe purge bingers – Matt Welch, Hit & RunReality check, without [...]
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:57 pm
When I’m travelling and meet some 19-year-old Belgian kid fluent in English, my rage overboils at the system pervasive in U.S. public schools, where no one even thinks of teaching foreign languages before high school. It’s idiotic, infuriating.
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Re: Hector, buddy, does it really surprise you that Afrikaans would be the ugliest sounding language, considering how ugly Afrikaaner society was?
Afrikaans is an offshoot of Dutch, and can still be read by Dutch speakers. Dutch is a very uneuphonious language, though I would not attribute that to anything in the culture.
I do disagree with Hector about German and French. They are not particularly ugly.
Re: ..the system pervasive in U.S. public schools, where no one even thinks of teaching foreign languages before high school…
The big problem is that we Americans do not much encounter foreign languages (other than Spanish in some areas) in our daily life. That’s the biggest reason we are so inept at foreign language. No matter how much or how well you teach a language a person who has no contact with it in real life will never really master it.
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:23 pm
DoD and State do divide the world up differently, but you’ve got the wrong DASD for Afghanistan. Dr. Kahl’s has the Middle East, while Ambassador David Sedney is the DASD for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia. According to Sedney’s bio, he speaks Romanian, Chinese and Azerbaijani.
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Foreign language fluency is gaining in popularity quickly. The reason we have not had interest in the past is because the incentive and immediate relevancy was not present. Our country stretches from coast to coast and English is the primary language.
Unlike in Africa, Asia, or Europe where every country which is the size of one of our states speaks a different language or every town for that matter.
We are making progress and foreign language fluency will grow rapidly for the next 20 years.