Quote Originally Posted by Brandon Friedman View Post
Instead of outsourcing the job of recruiting Pashto, Farsi, and Arabic speakers, why isn't the military recruiting them and sending them to Basic Training or OCS?
Schmedlap hit it on the head regarding why we aren't able to recruit many native-speaking linguists into the military. I had an 09L (that's a basic linguist) when we started our tour in Afghanistan. He spoke perfect Pashtu and perfect English. He was 24, in shape and spent time in Konar with the infantry there so he was tactically proficient (his rifle even had better optics than mine!). Unfortunately, he wasn't a US citizen at the time, so he couldn't get a security clearance, which meant he couldn't get an intel MOS. Technically we weren't allowed to use him for certain facets of our job. He volunteered to extend his tour, but no one would let him. It was just too much paperwork. As soon as he got back to the US, he got a job as a contract linguist making three or four times what he made as a soldier. But yeah, no clue why someone like that wouldn't want to join the military. :P

Think about this: most Afghan expats left the country between the late 1970s and early 1990s. The people who could do that were probably of certain economic status which means they were probably older or the children of someone with such status. These people rarely lived in the Pashtu speaking portions of the country. Need a 50 to 60-year-old Dari speaking Afghan with US citizenship? No problem. Need a young, Pashtu speaking US citizen? Not likely.

I dealt with this issue firsthand. We were lucky most of the time but I had an interpreter for a few weeks who spoke less Pashtu than I did. The linguist contract managers were ignoring the pleas of the interpreters not to send them to Pashtu-speaking areas because they didn't speak Pashtu. The contract managers turned a deaf ear to their pleas because they thought that Pashtu speakers were trying to hide their ability so that they wouldn't have to go to dangerous areas. Additionally, non-Pashtu speakers were getting help from fellow Afghans during the hiring process, in that they were given ways to cheat during the Pashtu proficiency tests so they would be more likely to get hired.

So yeah, the situation is f-ed up, but I don't expect it to get better unless we have a mass exodus of Pashtu- and English-speaking Pakistanis to the States (who, by the way, travel back in time 15 years so they'll be eligible for US citizenship by now). :P