Afghan Journal

Half a billion dollars for Afghan interpreters

Thousands of U.S. troops are streaming into Afghanistan each month as part of the surge, and among the things critical to their mission are the services of interpreters.

The U.S. army this month extended the contract of an Ohio-based company to provide translators for Afghanistan for another year at a cost of $679 million. U.S. and NATO commander Lt. General Stanley McChyrstal’s strategy for Afghanistan rests on winning the trust of the people and that can’t work if you don’t have enough people speaking any of their languages such as Pashto, Dari, Tajik, Uzbek.

The “terps”, as the soldiers call them in military slang, don’t just do literal translations, they provide insights into local culture and customs that are key to any attempt to win the people over. And above all, their ability to read the situation on the ground can often save lives.

So the military has turned to Mission Essential Personnel to recruit, screen and bring more than 5,000 interpreters into the battlefield. A handful of the translators are American citizens of Afghan descent, writes Noah Shactman on Danger Room blog. If they have the right language skills and can pass a security clearance, they can make up to $235,000 a year plus health benefits and their work is mostly “analysing communications” and “document exploitation” on one of of the big, comfortable U.S. bases in Afghanistan.

But the vast majority of the recruits are local Afghans, earning about $900 a month and their job is to accompany frontline troops into action, Shacktman says. These interpreters are given a week’s month’s worth of training before they’re shipped out to combat. Once there, they’re required to spend a year working 12-hour days, seven days a week, and be on-call during the remaining time.

It can be a gruelling schedule, and obviously dangerous. The danger is not just when they are out in the field with the troops. They are also targeted in their homes by the Taliban for working for foreign forces, and often their families are threatened.

 This weekend the Taliban said they had kidnapped and killed four Afghan interpreters, including one on his wedding day, because they worked for Western troops in Khost province.

Kandahar trusts Taliban more than govt – US army poll

The people of Kandahar province have greater trust in the Taliban than in the local government and an overwhelming majority consider them to be our  “Afghan brothers” according to a poll commissioned by the U.S.  army ahead of an impending offensive in the Taliban’s spiritual capital.

How is the offensive,  intended to be the turning point in the nearly nine-year war to proceed then, especially when U.S. army commanders have said they need the people’s support before any major operation can be launched in the southern province ?

Danger Room, a military-focused blog, said the unclassified report by the army’s Human Terrain System was a warning that a lack of confidence in the Afghan government “sets conditions for a disenfranchised population to respond either by not supporting the government due to its inability to deliver improvements in the quality of life or, worse yet, by supporting the Taliban.”

The survey draws on a total of 1,994 interviews covering nine of Kandahar Province’s 16 districts. But it leaves out seven crucial districts because they were considered too dangerous for the pollsters to visit. Still as the blog notes the results are telling. Here is a PDF of the report.

Among the findings : Security on the roads is a major issue for residents of Kandahar.  At least half of those polled in eight out of 10 districts said they felt unsafe travelling within their district or around the province.  Worse, they said the  biggest threat to security while travelling in the province were Army and police checkpoints.

A  sudden spike in incidents involving civilian casualties  in recent days has underscored the continuing threat to ordinary Afghans  even though the overall number of civilian casualties has fallen following new guidelines introduced by the commander of  U.S and NATO forces,  General Stanley McChrystal, as part of his strategy to win back the trust of the people.

This week NATO said troops opened fire on a vehicle in southeastern Khost province killing four unarmed Afghans.  The father of two of the victims said three of those killed were teenagers and the fourth was a policeman.  They were returning from a volleyball match.

The price of failure in Afghanistan

On the eve of Hamid Karzai’s inauguration as Afghanistan’s president, the obvious question to ask is what happens if he, or more crucially his Western backers, fail to turn back a resurgent Taliban the second time around.

Steve Coll, journalist and president of the New America Foundation, sets out four consequences of failure in Afghanistan in a blog in The New Yorker, which speak to those especially in America who question its involvement in the first place in this far-off “graveyard of empires.”

A new ABC/Washington Post poll says 52 percent of Americans don’t believe the war is worth the costs.

Coll says: 

1) If the world were to give up on Afghanistan and the Taliban were to return to power, it would mean a re-run of the Civil War in the 90s, but this time on “steroids”. It is inconceivable that the Taliban could triumph in the country completely and provide a regime (however perverse) of stability and so you could have a rump Afghan government dominated by ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks find arms and money from India, Iran, and perhaps Russia, Europe and the United States. This would likely produce a long-running civil war between northern, Tajik-dominated ethnic militias and the Pashtun-dominated Taliban.

2) Success in Afghanistan would give momentum for a Taliban revolution in Pakistan. If the Quetta Shura regained power in Kandahar or Kabul, it would undoubtedly interpret its triumph as a ticket to further ambition in Pakistan. The Pakistani Taliban would likely be energized, armed and financed by the Afghan Taliban as they pursue their own revolutionary ambitions in Islamabad.

3) Increased Islamist Violence Against India : The probable knock-on effect of a second Taliban revolution Afghanistan would be to increase the likelihood of irregular Islamist attacks from Pakistan against Indian targets as they see to extend their influence. In time, democratic Indian governments would be pressed by their electorates to respond with military force, and the world would then have to deal with a fourth Indian-Pakistan war, this time both nations nuclear-armed.

An Afghan mission that went wrong

Reuters Kabul correspondent Jonathon Burch is currently on an embed with the U.S. Army’s Stryker brigade in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province. On October 27,  seven soldiers from a platoon of the Strykers, named after an eight-wheel armoured combat vehicle, and an interpreter were killed in a bomb attack on the outskirts of Kandahar city.

Jonathon was accompanying them at the time and here’s his story :

The mission was simple. Some 20 U.S. soldiers were to patrol a riverbed in the dead of night, camp until morning, and provide backup to Afghan troops and their Canadian mentors in a clearing operation in Chahar Bagh village, an insurgent hotbed on the outskirts of Kandahar City.

Less than 12 hours later, seven of the soldiers and their Afghan interpreter would be dead, killed by a massive homemade bomb buried deep under pebbles along the dried-out riverbed.

The attack illustrates how a more aggressive U.S. military strategy of going into Taliban strongholds risks mounting casualties as President Barack Obama weighs whether to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan. The initial operation this week passed without incident. Around 200 Afghan soldiers and their Canadian trainers pushed through the village of mud houses surrounded by lush pomegranate orchards. A handful of men were arrested for later questioning.

The U.S. soldiers were not needed.”What are you going to write about? This is some boring ass mission,” one 1st Platoon soldier joked with a reporter as the sun rose behind a cragged mountain towering over the village. The soldiers — small groups from three platoons of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion 17th Infantry Regiment Stryker Brigade — had pushed out from their base at around midnight. Not far from Chahar Bagh village, they dismounted from their armoured Stryker vehicles and continued on foot.