The shortage of Arabic speakers in the Defense Department and intelligence agencies has been widely discussed since the fall of 2001. The United States had not had a need for Arabic speakers in prior eras, and few Americans were thought to be trained in the language. However, the realization emerged that the shortage in linguists may not be the result of a dearth of Arabic speakers in the US, but rather because of some of the government’s own policies in hiring them.
There are a number of stories of talented Arabic speakers frustrated by attempts to gain employment in the government. This article tells the story of an American citizen who grew up in Israel and the Palestinian Territories who finds himself “shut out” of government service. His long years in the region that yielded enviable fluency attracted suspicion that he may be under “foreign influence.” He faced one of the most common stumbling blocks in recruiting fluent Arabic linguists—the presence of close family remaining in the region. From a security standpoint, family members could be a source of this so-called “foreign influence.” However, the greatest concern with family remaining in the Middle East is that they are vulnerable to being threatened by foreign parties in order to blackmail the government translator or intelligence officer. This concern keeps considerable numbers of talented first generation Arab Americans out of government work.
People who have spent long periods in the region in order to learn the language but who do not have family there have a somewhat better chance of being awarded a clearance. However, this can take well over a year, during which time the applicant is neither paid nor employed by the government. The burden of having to be on-call and without pay for whenever the security clearance process is finished can be financially draining, as it precludes accepting other career opportunities. Meanwhile, private sector organizations that require security clearances can often provide employment while a clearance is being processed. Beyond that, there are myriad opportunities within various organizations, including multinational corporations, NGOs, media outlets, law firms, think tanks, and research organizations, that do not demand the arduous, invasive process of a security clearance and are supportive of the linguist traveling and having contacts in the Arab world. Because of the glut of alternative opportunities, many offering better pay, a cavalier attitude toward government rejection can develop.
The security clearance process specifically is responsible for the bottleneck. In other respects, the US government has been supportive of the development and employment of Arabic linguists. The National Security Education Program, in particular, awards generous scholarships that enable college graduates to pursue language training in the region. The US Department of Education also pays the tuition of students at CASA, the Center for Arabic Study Abroad, an advanced language training center located in Cairo, Egypt . Additionally, pay hikes and signing bonuses for Arabic linguists have been approved in some parts of the government to compete with private sector opportunities. Coming under pressure to relieve this bottleneck, the CIA announced in June 2005 that it would be revisiting the security clearance process . However, since the announcement, there has been no follow-up report of action. With the pace at which government bureaucracies pursue significant process revisions, it will be sometime before changes are made.
The Defense Department has been burned for relaxing some standards in clearing Arabic linguists needed for the war in Iraq (source). These well-publicized incidents provide a negative incentive for intelligence agencies and other parts of government to pursue changes in the existing policies. This is a pervasive problem, and because of it, changes in this process will either be slow in coming or may not happen at all.
This fact, coupled with the money the government is putting into training new linguists, indicates a strategy to train non-Arab Americans from scratch, rather than recruit among native speakers. This policy is to the detriment of our capabilities, not only because few Americans who begin the process of learning Arabic will ever achieve a form of proficiency (estimates say one in 10 Arabic students will ever be proficient in the language), but also because native speakers possess crucial skills in Arabic’s many dialects—skills that take a number of additional years and time spent in the region for the non-native speaker to learn. Further, once a non-native speaker is sent to the region to hone skills in Modern Standard Arabic or to learn a dialect, agencies run the risk of “foreign influence,” which they feared with native speakers from the onset.
