The Foreign Service Journal, February 2007

Languages & Service Needs A little-noted recommendation from the Iraq Study Group, Number 78, deals with language and cross-cul- tural training. The report notes that of the 1,000 officers at Embassy Bagh- dad, only six are fluent in Arabic. This is probably also true of other Middle Eastern languages: Turkish, Hebrew, Farsi, Dari, Urdu, etc. When I was ambassador in Turkey, we had to rely primarily on local staff for translation and interpretation. The same was true in Pakistan, where we had no fluent Urdu-speakers. We chose not to prepare for this situation, even when it became clear in the early 1980s that the need for Arabic and other Middle Eastern languages would increase and that the normal State Department training procedures were inadequate. I recall my own experience during World War II when, as a newly minted ensign in the U.S. Navy, barely 20 years old, I was asked to “volunteer” for Japanese language training. I was sent to the Navy’s School of Oriental Languages, at the campus of the University of Colorado at Boulder, for an 18-month, total-immersion langu- age training program. Students were to live, eat, socialize and work inten- sively with native language-speakers (mostly recruited from internment camps in the Midwest) to learn how to read, write and speak the language. The news was broadcast in Japan- ese, dinner-table conversation was in Japanese, and Japanese history and culture were learned in the language. Students were segregated from con- tact with the English-speaking envi- ronment as much as possible. New classes of five or six Marine or naval officers, almost all young and unmar- ried, were periodically launched to go through the course as a group. We all learned to read and write and speak the language in a sink-or-swim setting. Years later, as under secretary for management, I floated the idea of starting a similar program in Middle East languages away from Washing- ton, in collaboration with the Depart- ment of Defense and the CIA. But it quickly became clear that the idea was unwelcome for a variety of reasons. It would have required increasing our intake of younger offi- cers with language aptitude at the beginning of their careers, as well as additional funding. As it was, our Arabic-language program in North Africa was always under threat, as were even the ordinary FSI language- training programs that we did not feel effectively met our needs in hard lan- guages and non-Western cultures. Moreover, it could have prejudiced funding for the FSI facility at Arling- ton, then one of our highest manage- ment priorities. Today, the current leadership in the Department of State should grab the opening the ISG Report offers and run with it. Ron Spiers Career ambassador, retired S. Londonderry, Vt. A Long-Term Project Robert McMahon’s “Seeking a Patient Path to Nationbuilding” (Nov- ember FSJ ) is a perceptive and timely piece that usefully underscores the point that to be effective, the commit- ment of the U.S. and the international community to nationbuilding must be long term. McMahon correctly char- acterizes the irresponsible haste with which the United Nations, under U.S. and other Security Council members’ pressure, abandoned critical tasks in East Timor. He also correctly identi- fies the failure of the international community to fully underwrite the rehabilitation of Afghanistan. In both instances, renewed violence has been the consequence of the decision to short-shrift these critical ventures. In neither instance was there suffi- cient international commitment to address the cry for justice in those societies. In East Timor, the U.N. and the U.S. agreed to allow the Indon- esian courts to address the culpability of those Indonesian military and police officials responsible for unleashing the massive post-referendum violence in 1999 that led to the death of over 1,400 East Timorese (and some U.N. staff), destruction of 75 percent of the tiny nation’s infrastructure and dis- placement of nearly one third of the population. That tragedy, and the 24 preceding years of brutal Indonesian rule, traumatized the Timorese peo- ple. The U.S. and U.N. gave Indonesian courts the responsibility to address what was in fact a crime against the international community. Those courts, notorious for their practice of affording impunity to the Indonesian security forces, have failed to convict a L ETTERS 6 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7