Linguistic Deficiency and Foreign-Relations and Intelligence Failure
By Marion Edwyn Harrison (07/13/07)
American diplomats and other Federal personnel dealing with foreign relations, with prevention of terrorism in many of its manifestations and various kinds of defense intelligence at best are handicapped, at worst unqualified, because they cannot speak essential foreign languages. Several public revelations this year and last of this pervasive inadequacy have had only minimal rectifying effect.
One such revelation came in the form of a General Accountability Office (“GAO”) report, reflecting as is usually the case GAO’s objectivity and fearlessness of offending powers-that-be. That report is startling, almost to the point of incredibility. For example, about four of ten workers in United States Government posts requiring Arabic, Chinese or Japanese fail the test. It gets worse in other places - e.g., Cairo, where some 59% flunked. Last month the Department of State, reacting almost with a sense of panic (justified panic, at that), announced introduction of a rather sweeping program to teach Arabic to many of its personnel. That program or its functional equivalent, dangerously belated as it is, should be the first of many, in the Department of State and elsewhere.
There are numerous positions in the Federal Government which the official or employee cannot handle adequately lacking specific linguistic facility. Many of them - as in various “intel” or “IT” or intelligence activities, at home and abroad - necessarily are not well known to the public. Others, such as United States Ambassadors abroad, are more obvious.
It is true that to the extent there is a lingua franca, or universal language, it is English. However, more people natively speak one of several other languages than English. Two are so obvious they stand out, Chinese and Arabic. That Chinese includes Mandarin, Cantonese and Fukanese, and that Arabic has many dialects merely complicate the educational process. It hardly diminishes the value of fluency.
However, regardless of English’s lingua franca status, untold numbers of people outside the English-speaking countries who speak it do not fluently speak or understand it. Hence, translators are everywhere. A translator immediately introduces the prospect for miscommunication. And, quite obviously, the American relying upon a translator cannot know with certainty what the speaker has said or is saying or what the writer has written.
The contrast is dramatic. Visit an American embassy, consulate or vice-consulate in a country in which the native language is not English. How amazing it is that many, sometimes most, Americans working there are not fluent in the prevailing local language - indeed, sometimes not even conversational or passable. Foreign diplomats, and presumably spies, in this country almost invariably are conversant in English, albeit sometimes with a heavy accent (which, of course, does not hinder their comprehension of English).
No wonder we often learn too little and/or too late what is going on. Any of us who has traveled abroad and had occasion to talk with - maybe snoop around? - American governmental enclaves has his or her own story of linguistic inadequacy. I personally have witnessed it in our Parisian, Bangkok and Buenos Aires Embassies, in one of our Greek Consulates, in our Istanbul Consulate General, vicariously elsewhere. The Department of State, as though it were a significant achievement, claims that ten Foreign Service officers in Iraq now can read and speak Arabic, five others can speak Arabic, all at the Department’s 3-level (of which there are four levels). Although the figures may not be 100% in accord, the Iraq Study Group, an independent entity, about six months ago reported that of some 1,000 employees at our Baghdad Embassy, only 33 speak Arabic, six of them fluently. Whatever the figures, all such personnel at the least should be passable in Arabic, most of them conversational, many of them fluent.
Around Washington many people have had the experience of knowing, or at least meeting, somebody in our own intelligence work who only barely is familiar with the requisite foreign language.
Because English is such a universal, as well as prolific, language, and only two of our United States borders, Mexico and to a point Québec, speak another language, the foreign-language incentive for most of us naturally is minimal.
However, from the more conspicuous top on down - that is, our ambassadors, there ought to be an example of applicable linguistic fluency. In any country in which Arabic or an Oriental or Southeast Asian language is that of the populace, the ambassador’s linguistic facility serves not only as an example but as a necessity. Not absolutely necessary but certainly helpful and an exemplar, our Ambassador to Switzerland ought to be conversant in at least one of the four Swiss languages – French, German, Italian, Romansh (also called Rumantsch), and particularly French and German.
I lack contemporary knowledge of the Chinese fluency of our personnel in China and Taiwan. I do know, from personal conversation, if any speak Mandarin as fluently and artfully as the (recently promoted to Foreign Minister) Chinese Ambassador here they would be masters of that language.
1.3 billion people might be telling us something, spying on us or whatever, beneficial or otherwise.
Marion Edwyn Harrison is President of, and Counsel to, the Free Congress Foundation.
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