File this one under "pet peeves." American Forces Network Afghanistan just posted a video: "The Zabul Provincial Reconstruction Team's public information officer speaks Pashto!"
The fact that this is considered newsworthy and exceptional – a U.S. military officer speaks one of the official languages of Afghanistan! – doesn't reflect well on the national commitment to Afghanistan. Eight years after its involvement in Afghanistan began, the U.S. military still relies overwhelmingly on contract interpreters, and troops by and large aren't equipped with survival-level Dari or Pashto. Why don't all of the PRT team members speak the local lingo?
Back in 2006, as the Army and the Marine Corps were preparing to roll out FM 3-24, I interviewed then-Lt. Gen. David Petraeus about the military's push for greater cultural sophistication. "If you’re going to operate in another language, you have to either know the language, which is pretty tough, [or] you certainly ought to have a survival level of that language," he said. "It’s something like you recall in the NATO days, it was Gateway to German, or Gateway to Italian: Every American soldier had to go through this in the first two or three weeks that he or she was in theater. And that turned out to be useful, in fact all of us can still parrot our phrases, “Wo ist der Bahnhof?” and all that other stuff."
