A recent posting from the [My] State Failure Blog turned me on to the work of John McHugh, a photojournalist who’s been spending a lot of time in Afghanistan. I haven’t gone through his Guardian work yet but this video really brought me back to my time there.
One of the most fundimental challanges in being a solider in a foreign land (not to mention trying to run a successful counterinsurgency campaign) is communicating with the local population. Even though there were way too few troops in country when I was there, there was a constant shortage of translators. The majority of translators are locals who happened to know some english (just how much varied greatly) and were not suppossed to be privy to sensitive information. There were also U.S. citizens, frequently immigrants from Afghanistan, who returned either to help out their new country, their old country, cash in on the $15,000 per month paycheck they were earning or some combination of all three. Many of these people were given security clearances and therefore were able to be present during sensitive discussions, planning or negotiations.
The demand for translators with clearances (all the ones I knew of hired via private contracting companies) was huge. So huge, in fact, that many of us had suspicions that corners were cut in the hiring and vetting of many of these interpreters (not to mention the fact that many of them had questionable language skills).
Translators present two significant problems: errors in translation and abuse of position.
Errors in translation are similar to what you see in the video. I can’t tell you how many times I asked a local a question, heard him give a lengthy response and then have the interpreter tell me “He says ‘Hi’.” You then have to decide if you want to get into it with your interpreter and make him tell you everything that was said. Even then, you can’t be sure if you’re getting the correct translation.
Abuse of position can occur with any interpreter but the most serious repercussions occur with the contracted U.S. citizens. There were so few around, and the pay was so good that interpreters frequently spent much more time in country than soldiers. When I got there in 2003, there were several interpreters that had been there almost continuously since the war began, and all their work was in one geographical area. This positioned the interpreters to be a sort of court Vizier. Many commanders relied on their interpreters to tell them who they should meet, who was friendly and who to trust. Rumors were rife that some interpreters sold access (’Oh, you want to have a meeting with the commander? Then you must pay me.’) and influence.
Now, that is way, WAY outside the bounds of what interpreters are suppossed to do. They, like their name implies, are suppossed to translate. That’s it. Just relay what was just said in one language into another language. Without commentary, opinion, additions or subtractions. I have to admit, that it took me a while to learn that lesson myself but many (including many much senior to myself) never learned it. There was a policy in place to rotate interpreters every so often just so that they couldn’t build up a network of clients and abuse their power. I never saw such a policy enforced although I did see an attempt. Some young officer (a captain, I believe) responsible for tracking the interpreters sent out a memo saying that all of our interpreters with security clearances would be rotated on a certain day. Very shortly thereafter, that order was recinded because of an outcry by senior personnel about how much damage would be caused if they lost ‘their’ interpreter. Now, if all they’re suppossed to do is translate, why do you need a specific person? You don’t. But if you’re using that interpreter as a crutch to tell you how to do your job you fight like hell to keep him.
My theory is that the requirements of a counterinsurgency campaign didn’t really sink in during 2003/2004 and many just didn’t know what they were supposed to do. Who was taught how to deal with local populations? Who even knew what our broad strategy was? So it became easy for some to rely on a person who had been there longer and spoke the language.
I only trusted one translator when I was there and he was a local without any sort of clearance. By the end of our tour we’d try (usually unsuccessfully) to get two interpreters to go out with us so we could have a bit of check and balance. Competition was intense among interpreters (frequently he who was attached to the highest ranking soldier rose to prominence in their own internal pecking order) and so you could usually rely on them to stab each other in the back and tell you about screw ups. That was usually all the incentive interpreters needed to do their job properly.
