After Sputnik, It Was Russian; After 9/11, Should It Be Arabic?

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the New York Times,
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/16/education/16education.html

June 16, 2004

After Sputnik, It Was Russian; After 9/11, Should It Be Arabic?
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

WASHINGTON, D.C.

LESS than a year after the Soviet Union launched a satellite named Sputnik
in October 1957, America answered with a counterstrike. It was a piece of
legislation, the National Defense Education Act, which aimed at harnessing
brain power rather than weaponry for the cold war. Mostly, the statute
poured federal money into stimulating the study of mathematics and
science, disciplines most relevant to the arms race, but a portion
provided incentives for universities to develop skilled speakers of
strategic languages, especially Russian.

Over more than three decades, as the support for language study was
written into other federal laws, a steady stream of 30,000 or more
American university students took Russian courses each year. They became
not only the translators, cryptologists and intelligence agents required
for what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. famously called the "long twilight
struggle" between Communism and the West but also the scholars, diplomats
and sundry Sovietologists who in many ways enacted the policy of dtente
and assisted in the peaceful resolution of the cold war.

Now, nearly three years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda
and amid a turbulent occupation of Iraq, Congress and the Bush
administration have failed to endorse and endow a similar cohort of
civilian experts in the languages of the Muslim world. While the
administration has given priority to training more linguists within the
military and the national-security apparatus, legislation modeled on the
National Defense Education Act and offered repeatedly over several years
by Congressional Democrats has not even made it out committee.

Meanwhile, of more than 1.8 million graduates of American colleges and
universities in 2003, exactly 22 took degrees in Arabic, according to
Department of Education statistics. "Compared to the cold war, we're not
even at the level of zero," said Dan E. Davidson, the president of the
American Councils for International Education in Washington and a
professor of Russian at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. "We're at minus
one."

Such views are widely shared among experts in languages and national
security. "In the post-9-11 world, we've continued to not get the
profundity of the problem," said Ellen Laipson, a linguist and former
intelligence official who is now president of the Henry L. Stimson Center,
a Washington public policy institute focusing on national security issues.
"We're reduced to putting 800 numbers on the TV screen asking for people
who speak Arabic." Ms. Laipson referred to one of several episodes in the
immediate aftermath of the Al Qaeda attacks that laid bare the
government's language gap. The F.B.I. had a backlog of thousands of hours
of audiotape and thousands of pages of written material in Arabic and
Central Asian languages waiting for translation.

The State Department had to call a diplomat fluent in Arabic back from
retirement to appear on the Al Jazeera cable network. A report in early
2002 by the General Accounting Office confirmed that shortages of
linguists had "hindered U.S. military, law enforcement, intelligence,
counterterrorism and diplomatic efforts." Representative Rush Holt, a
Democrat from New Jersey who has sponsored several measures on language
education in the House, recalled meeting with Special Forces soldiers who
had been involved in the futile hunt for Osama bin Laden. None, Mr. Holt
said, was fluent in Pashto, the primary language along the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

"There doesn't seem to be anywhere in our government a strategic view
about how you get a new flow of linguists," Mr. Holt said in an interview
last week. "It's all based on the assumption there's a pool of linguists
already out there. And that's a fallacious assumption." Last year, Mr.
Holt introduced the National Security Language Act, which would have put
at least $75 million into encouraging study of critical languages from
primary school through the graduate level and culling skilled speakers
from ethnic and immigrant communities.

Two Democratic senators, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Daniel K. Akaka
of Hawaii, offered a similar package of incentives both in 2001 and 2003
under the rubric of the Homeland Security Education Act. Without
Republican backing, those measures went nowhere.

The Bush administration instead has relied heavily on the Defense Language
Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, Calif., to meet the
nation's linguistic needs. By design, however, the institute serves only
military personnel, accommodating up to 3,500 annually with courses in 21
languages. Trent Duffy, a deputy press secretary in the White House, said
the Bush administration addressed nonmilitary language needs with $100
million in aid under the Higher Education Act. "Past that," he said, "it's
left up to the individual student which fields to pursue."

Experts in language study offer several reasons for the administration's
seeming indifference. President Bush's involvement in education is
centered on the No Child Left Behind law, which itself has not been fully
financed. Neoconservatives inside and outside government have assailed
Middle East studies departments - the likely recipients of any increased
federal money for advanced study of Arabic and related languages - for
alleged bias against the United States and Israel. It is expensive and
time-consuming to conduct security checks of Arab immigrants interested in
serving as linguists.

"We can hope, but hope won't do it," said Richard Brecht, a former Air
Force cryptographer who is executive director of the Center for the
Advanced Study of Language, a joint project of the Defense Department and
the University of Maryland based in College Park. "Five billion dollars
for an F-22 will not help us in the battle against terrorism. Language
that helps us understand why they're trying to harm us will."

Congress will soon demonstrate whether such a realization is taking hold.
This week Representative Holt and several Republican co-sponsors are
introducing two bills that amount to a pared-down version of his National
Security Language Act, this time focusing on higher education and adult
civilians at a fraction of the original price tag.

"If Osama bin Laden is indeed America's most wanted," Mr. Holt said, "then
clearly we're limited if we can't speak the language of the people who
might be hiding him."


E-mail: sgfreedman at nyimes.com