Americans have long trained our trading partners and military allies to work with us in English, so people in other countries are just doing what we asked them to do and now benefit from our wisdom. Their skills in speaking our language allow Anglophone Indians to develop business software and answer our 800 calls –without any perceived impact on the quality of the interaction. Meanwhile, agencies like the CIA lack the linguistic, cultural, and economic analysis skills to deal with our latest set of enemies. As this front-page story from the New York Times indicates, when they try to find such people, they worry that these fluent speakers might be moles with different agendas on their minds.

When it comes to foreign language, U.S. leaders only respond to sudden wake-up calls — for example, Sputnik in 1957 led to two decades of funding National Defense Foreign Language programs and 9/11 spurred today’s scramble for speakers of Arabic, Pashto, and Farsi. But you cannot develop fluent speakers of any language over night, and Arabic languages are much more difficult for Americans to master. Academics estimate that it takes five years to produce an Arabist with conversational capability and fully ten years to achieve in-country fluency.

Where will these trained linguists come from? Not from our current education system. A 2002 study by the Modern Language Association trumpeted the “greatest-ever variety of languages being taught” in the U.S., large increases in the study of Arabic, Biblical Hebrew, and American Sign Language, and the fact that 8.7% of American students now study foreign languages. However, more students study Biblical Hebrew (14,469) or Ancient Greek (20,858) than do Arabic (10,596). This paucity of Arabic speakers certainly contributed to our intelligence failures in Iraq, our inability to go toe-to-toe with other news sources in the region, and the princely US$25,000 bounty on the heads of Iraqi interpreters. It’s not just about Arabic, either. In 2003 officials at the U.S. State Department wondered about North Korea’s two different translations of a press release regarding its nuclear capability. Apparently no one in Foggy Bottom ever thought to ask one of the 5,211 students studying Korean in American schools to take a look at the original Korean-language communiqué and resolve the dispute.

Perhaps the CIA could choose from a well-qualified pool of Arabists ten years from now if the U.S. Congress ever passes the National Security Language Act (HR3676) or its successor. Had it been passed by the 108th Congress, this bill would have provided a munificent US$27 million to colleges to teach critical languages plus science and math classes in those languages, and would forgive some student loans. $27 million for the entire United States, for all strategic languages, for all the linguists we need? Yes, that little for such big expected and necessary returns. The bill was re-introduced to the current Congress as HR115 and was referred to the House Committee on Education Reform on 9 February 2005 — where it still sits. If nothing else, Americans are consistent when it comes to the importance of foreign languages, even when national security is at stake.

Perhaps we need a “No Linguist Left Behind” program to protect U.S. security interests?