“America Will Always Fail At Regional Expertise”, 2016-01-13 ():
I have argued before that any potential American foreign policy or ‘grand strategy’ that requires statesmen with a nuanced understanding of a foreign region’s cultures, politics, and languages to implement it is doomed to fail. Regional acumen is a rare trait, and one I greatly admire. But it is rare for a reason. Regional acumen just does not scale—or at least, Americans do not know how to scale it. I have said this before. But it was reinforced tonight when I stumbled—quite by accident—across this old New York Times Magazine personal by Lydia Kiesling. In it she describes her experience learning Uzbek with a FLAS grant from the Department of Education.
…This article gets to the heart of why America will always lack the kind of language and area expertise needed to succeed in the kinds of things the American people (or American leaders) often demand the United States government do. Uzbek is an obscure language. But it is an obscure language at the center of the national security concerns that have bedeviled the United States over the last decade and a half. To give a brief picture:
There are about three million Uzbeks who live in Afghanistan. Uzbeks were an essential part of the Northern Alliance’s resistance against the Taliban, and Uzbek leaders became an important part of the government established by NATO forces once the Taliban was driven from power. This is still true. Afghanistan’s current vice-president, Abdul Rashid Dostum, is an Uzbek.
Uzbekistan is the central hub of central Asia. One of the greatest defeats of our Afghan campaign happened not on the battlefield, but at the diplomats’ table. Uzbekistan’s decision to withdraw American basing and supply rights was nothing short of a disaster, forcing the United States to be even more dependent on Pakistan (our true enemy in the region) for logistic support.
Uzbek and Uighur are a hair’s breadth away from mutually intelligible. Xinjiang’s low intensity Uighur insurgency is the single greatest security concern of China, America’s greatest rival.
This is a language that matters. What happens to the woman who spent a year of her life studying it? She was rejected from the CIA (or wherever) on background technicalities, and has not used her language since. Or to be more precise, she has used it twice. Twice in four years. Twice.
This gets to the heart of America’s problem with regional acumen. Area expertise simply doesn’t pay. You may count the number of private sector jobs currently on the market that demand Uzbek fluency on two hands. And even if there were a multitude of jobs that required proficiency in Uzbek and English, there are undoubtedly several hundred—perhaps several thousand—Uzbekistanis who speak English better than Ms. Kiesling speaks Uzbek, and who will work for less pay to boot.
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