Juan Cole complained in a September 9 article on the Huffington Post that the American media is a security risk to the US. In this case he was referring to the paucity of US television time devoted to covering the devastating floods in Pakistan and their aftermath. It was as if Pakistan and those millions of Pakistanis killed or left homeless as a result of the surging Monsoon waters that covered one-fifth of their country did not exist.
Cole pointed out that with the exception of PBS and occasional broadcasts on CNN aired when most of the country was asleep, the Pakistani floods this past summer represented a non-event for most Americans. Yet, Pakistan has been designated a nation at risk and crucial to this country’s battle with Al Qaeda. Maybe as a result of the almost invisible television coverage, Cole suggests, American private donations to aid the Pakistani flood victims have lagged substantially in comparison with the massive television coverage and perhaps consequent outpouring of support for Haitian earthquake victims earlier this year.
Cole’s dreary assessment may well be right. If so, it shows the crucial role television still plays in this country’s information chain – for good and ill.
Ignorance is not bliss
The US is facing a number of serious security risks to which too few are privy, that is, until it’s too late. The lack of American media coverage of problems that affect this nation’s future, therefore, plays a significant part.
Why, for instance, did it take years and a whistle-blower lawsuit for the following military contractor story to break into the big time? If ABC’s Nightline had not investigated and broadcast “Exclusive: Whistleblower claims many US Interpreters Can’t Speak Afghan Languages” on September 8, 2010 which resulted from an individual’s law suit against a private company, would this contractor shortcoming have – for all intents and purposes - continued to be unheard - just another tree falling in a silent forest? But ABC did – and kudos to Nightline and Diane Sawyer for the story’s airing because of its important to US national security.
A good 28 percent of the interpreters found deficient
In this case, Nightline’s finger was aimed at an Ohio-based contract firm called Mission Essential Personnel (MEP) that recruits and supplies Dari and Pashto interpreters for the US Army in Afghanistan. The law suit that brought the failings into public view was filed by Paul Funk, a former interpreter-screening overseer at the company.
In the suit he charges that the company’s recruits failed to meet the language requirements set by the Army and as a consequence, unqualified interpreters were sent out to accompany US troops in the field more than a quarter of the time. He argued that a good 28 percent of the interpreters hired by MEP during 2007-8 destined for Afghanistan were incompetent. Those interpreters, Funk says, as this post's headline indicates, couldn’t interpret. And the reason they couldn’t was because they were apparently hired under false and shoddy pretenses: their interviews were conducted by phone - not in person and stand-ins were used all too frequently. (Had no one heard of Skype?) To make matters worse, test results for those who failed the army’s proficiency standards were also falsified by MEP according to the law suit. MEP is challenging the suit.
US troops in the field, nevertheless, depend on an interpreter’s accuracy and fluency for survival as do the success of their missions and the good will of the Afghan communities they visit on those missions. And, according to the Nightline report, Funk’s charges are corroborated by others.
Why is the pool of qualified interpreters so tiny?
There’s another figure in the Nightline report that needs to be taken into consideration and that is the tiny pool of qualified Americans – only about 3,800 who speak Dari or Pashto - according to MEP’s chief operating officer – from which to recruit. This tiny pool should have been a red flag in and of itself. Since the stakes are high – a civilian contract interpreter is paid as much as $200,000 per year for his or her work in the field - the financial incentives to cheat are high.
Maybe, however, the paucity of Americans who can communicate in these critical languages – is the underlying problem – and this is what the ABC Nightline story should have equally highlighted. It’s been nine years since 9/11 and the US invasion of Afghanistan in response. It’s also been 31 years since the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan put the country on America’s national security map.
Thus it’s also been more than enough time for the US military to train its own personnel in the major languages of this - or any country in which it has troops stationed - but obviously this hasn’t happened in Afghanistan.
Yes, I know foreign language training is expensive and time consuming – so is physical fitness and manufacturing all that body armor - but it can be done. This is the real story that should come from the Nightline report. All the physical training and expensive military hardware just doesn’t compute in a struggle for hearts and minds. First off, you have to be able to communicate with the people.