"Our Diplomats' Arabic Handicap," by Jennifer Bremer - the Washington Post, 16 Oct 2005, p B 01 (registration required). The author is identified as a former FSO who studied Arabic and who served at the US Embassy in Cairo. She is now a faculty member of the business school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.
Karen Hughes, the new head of public diplomacy for the Bush administration, came back from the Middle East last month chastened by the communications chasm looming between the region's public and ourselves. She had seen firsthand that there are few quick fixes in the Middle East. But we do have one simple option that could move us a big step forward: teaching our diplomats to speak Arabic.
At a time when the U.S. government has an urgent need both to understand what's being said in the Arab world and to express our own views clearly, surely every U.S. embassy in the Mideast is staffed with at least several American diplomats who speak Arabic, right? Well, no. Four years after 9/11, we're still a very long way from achieving this fundamental goal, as the State Department's internal performance reviews and interviews with human resource and language training staff make clear. Policy is not the problem: State Department planning documents call for increased Arabic language capabilities in the Foreign Service. The problem is that the way we're going about meeting this goal guarantees failure.
To understand why requires a safari into the bureaucratic undergrowth, so grab your machete. The Foreign Service classifies language ability into five levels, with "1" being the lowest (able to handle only the very simplest social situations) and "5" the highest (a level rarely assigned to anyone but a native speaker).
From a public diplomacy standpoint, the key distinction is between a "3" and a "4." We have a fairly good supply of 3's in Arabic, almost 200 as of August 2004 (the latest State Department data available). A level 3 can handle one-on-one situations, or something like a ministry meeting in a subject area they know well. But a level 3 speaker would flounder in a complex situation. If you put a 3 in a public meeting where many excited people are speaking on top of one another, for example, or in a coffee shop conversation with college students arguing about religion and the state, he or she would be lost. Double the difficulty if the diplomat has been trained only in Modern Standard Arabic, a formal dialect very different from the colloquial dialects that people actually speak (see sidebar). But these are precisely the kinds of situations that our Middle East diplomats must be equipped to handle.
Speaking, moreover, is generally harder than listening. No responsible person would ask a 3 to speak before an unfriendly crowd at the local university (or at the embassy gates), much less put a 3 in front of a television camera and expect a clear, engaging and cogent discussion of U.S. Middle East policy in Arabic. For that you need a 4, and preferably a 4+ or a 5. So how many of these 4 and 5 level speakers do we have in Arabic? As of August 2004 -- 27. At the highest levels (4+ and 5), we have a grand total of eight individuals worldwide....
Bremer goes on to identify several practical barriers to increasing the number of State Department officers who are fluent in Arabic, especially the time and cost involved in language training. As Bremer notes, the Foreign Service standard is that it takes two years of full-time language study to bring a new Arabic languge student to the '3' level. (An additional, major barrier that Bremer doesn't get into is that embassy work routines and institutional values, combined with security practices, tend to keep US diplomats inside a Washington-oriented and English-speaking setting rather than enabling them to explore and deepen their knowledge of the local environment.)
She concludes with these suggestions:
[W]e should allocate funds for part-time, on-the-job advanced language instruction at post and in Washington, targeting 3's and up. Second, we should make language training mandatory at all Middle Eastern posts (and, ideally, for Washington-based Foreign Service staff working on the region as well) and build it into the workload. Third, we should make sustained progress toward fluency an evaluation factor for all Foreign Service officers assigned to the region. And fourth, we should reward advanced fluency (3+ and above) with a pay premium, regardless of whether the diplomat in question is assigned to a language-designated post.
The suggestions Bremer makes are, from a management point of view, perfectly sensible. In fact, I'm a bit puzzled that they're there for her to make. There usually were language classes or tutoring available at the embassies I served at, and officers who attained fluency in designated languages did receive a significant pay bonus. In any event, factors like intellectual pride, and pleasure in gaining understanding of another culture, were bigger motivating factors in foreign language achievement among officers I knew than pay incentives were.
But even if Bremer's suggestions would in fact address current shortcomings in Foreign Service language training, there is a fundamental flaw in her argument. It's expressed in her final paragraph:
...We just can't afford to keep missing what the Arab world is saying to us and miscommunicating our positions back to them. What better way to narrow the communications gap than to learn how to speak the Arab world's own language?
Language is not the same thing as communication. The assumption that US public diplomacy is not having the desired effect in the Arabic-speaking world because it is not being conducted in fluent Arabic is an only slightly more enlightened version of the idea that you can get what you want from a non-English speaker by repeating your request in a louder voice. Speaking the other person's language is no guarantee that he'll agree with what you're saying, or think you're any less of a boor.
Consider Jordan. English is widely spoken as a second language by that country's educated and professional classes, the US has long had an active public diplomacy program there, and many Jordanians have direct or, through family and friends, indirect experience with Americans and the United States. There's no lack of communication going on there -- and yet the Pew Global Attitudes Project has repeatedly found that, since 2002, only about one in five Jordanians holds a favorable opinion of the United States.
Also consider that, as Shibley Telhami has repeatedly noted, the Arabic speaking world is not the only place where the US has public diplomacy problems. Anti-US sentiment has been increasing in Latin America and Europe, too -- and those are places where US embassies have many more officers who can hold their own in the local language.
If there is in fact a problem with Americans "missing what the Arab world is saying to us and miscommunicating our positions back to them" (I'm not at all sure there is), the root of the problem does not lie in lack of language skills. Rather, it lies in Americans' current propensity to shut out or distort messages we don't like to hear, and our failure to imagine or respect what the world we take part in making looks like to other people.
The USA has created its own problem with a lack of Arabic speakers, as the UK did before the first Gulf War. Too many have been fired for holding arabic sympathies, whatever that may be!
Pi.
Posted by: Pi. | 16 October 2005 at 07:51 PM