A huge and increasingly urgent problem for the United States government is foreign language fluency among its representatives. As we discussed in class, few if any troops in Afghanistan and Iraq speak Arabic, making it extremely difficult to connect with the local populations. However, the level of fluency in the US Foreign Service (Part of the State Department) is also shockingly bad. According to the Washington Post article cited below, 57% of US Foreign Service officers in Iraq can not adequately communicate in Arabic. However, even this number pales in comparison to the 73% of officers in Afghanistan who can not speak sufficient Arabic. These numbers are surprisingly high given the administration's stated desires to win the war by establishing relationships with the people on the ground.
It would be logical to assume that this problem exists only because Arabic has only recently become an important language to learn, meaning that there is a lack of qualified applicants. However, this does not seem to completely explain the high numbers. Over all Arabic speaking countries, 40% of officers are considered deficient. It is interesting that the US government has apparently decided to leave many competent Arabic speakers in these other countries rather than transfer them Iraq and Afghanistan where many would argue they are needed most.
Even moving beyond Arabic though, according to the article, one third of all officers did not pass their foreign language reading and speaking examinations. So the specific claim that Arabic is a language whose demand has exploded is not sufficient. It seems obvious that Foreign Service Officers should be required to speak the language of the area they are assigned. Looking on the State Department's website, Foreign Service Officers are generously compensated and a serious attempt is made to attract qualified applicants by matching their current salary. However, the State Department could perhaps better incentivize applicants and current officers by increasing pay for speakers of rarer languages.
Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/07/AR2010040704503.htmlForeign Service Officer Recruiting:
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