AROUND this time three years ago, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked in a leaked memo, "Are we winning or losing the global war on terror?" While the jury may still be out on that question, nearly all experts agree that the key lies in winning the so-called "hearts and minds" of the people. If we are to turn people in countries such as Iraq away from radical Islam, we must develop an alternative, more attractive ideology. But in order to accomplish this, we must be able to communicate effectively with the people. Unfortunately, we are failing at this miserably.
The State Department, Pentagon and National Security Council (just to name a few) are woefully understaffed with Arab experts. According to The Washington Post, the military is currently employing 6,500 contracted translators in Iraq and 1,500 in Afghanistan. How are we ever going to work with Iraqis if we can't even talk to them? The Pentagon is trying to find far-fetched technological solutions to this problem when it really should be focusing on domestic education. We need to have university students learning "strategic languages" such as Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Chinese, etc. and studying Arab culture. If a new crop of government officials and soldiers are able to understand and communicate with the people we are trying to keep from extremism, then we can win the war on terror. The military needs to stop paying lip-service to the importance of foreign languages and embrace this solution. Comprehensive, well-funded efforts to teach foreign languages directed at both undergraduate and graduate students are essential if we are to win the war on terror.
In early January, the government introduced the National Security Language Initiative. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Barry Lowenkorn mentioned funding for high school language teachers, improving higher education language instruction and increasing the number of Fulbright Scholarships in his press releases. The administration of the program would even be split between the Departments of Education, State and Defense as this strategic issue transcends bureaucratic lines. The problem is NSLI's budget is a paltry $114 million for fiscal year 2007. There is no way a program that small could produce meaningful change in the way either State or Defense interact with the average Iraqi. So the Pentagon now, 11 months later, finds itself clutching at straws and buying "Phraselators" in desperation.
The military is currently employing a device that is supposed to be able to translate freely between English and Arabic called the Phraselator. Developed by VoxTec International Inc., a Maryland firm, the Phraselator stores recordings of basic phrases to enable basic communication in the absence of a translator. Or at least that must have been what vendors told the Pentagon when they duped them into buying the worthless machine. Dialects differ widely across the Arab world so no single device could possibly replace a translator. Even within Iraq, "simple phrases
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