It’s All Pashto to Them

The Global Positioning System, unmanned drones, unrivaled databases, and handheld computers — much has been made of the technological resources available to the U.S. military and diplomatic establishments. But what do you do if you’re trying to wage war in or against a country where you don’t know the locals, can’t speak the language, and can’t find any reliable maps? Welcome to the front lines of the war against terrorism, likely to be waged primarily in "swamp states" about which the United States knows little.

Consider Afghanistan. The United States has not had an embassy there since 1989. And according to Theodore Eliot, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 1973 to 1978, it has generally been neglected by the U.S. foreign-policy establishment ever since. Afghanistan rated one sentence in the Congressional Research Service’s 2001 report "Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Policy: Key Issues in the 107th Congress." The CIA reportedly had no agents on the ground in Afghanistan prior to the terrorist attacks on September 11. The United States also has no up-to-date tactical maps (those with a scale of 1:50,000) of Afghanistan and will likely rely on Russia’s. And U.S. forces will have a hard time asking the locals for directions: At the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, the military’s premiere language training facility, the Dari variant of Farsi that is the predominant language of Afghanistan wasn’t even on the curriculum. This year, not one person at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute is studying Pashto, the language of the Taliban.

Such blind spots extend far beyond Afghanistan. At hearings held last year on foreign-language capabilities in national security and the federal government, Ellen Lapison, vice chair of the National Intelligence Council, identified a serious weakness in East Asian and Middle Eastern languages, noting that "should this situation continue we could face the possibility of a technological surprise." And according to Robert Steele, the CEO of Open Source Solutions, the lack of tactical maps extends to most areas in the Third World where the United States faces the greatest challenges from instability. Steele blames the U.S. decision to favor covert satellites designed to observe Soviet missile silos over wide-area surveillance satellites optimized for mapping.

Sun Tzu, the fifth century B.C. Chinese general who wrote The Art of War, once observed, "If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat." If any war on terrorism is to succeed, the United States has some serious learning to do.