Joshua Foust has a good commentary at The New York Times concerning interpreters in counterinsurgency.

IN counterinsurgency, the most important thing is winning over the local population. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander in charge of all NATO forces in Afghanistan, was right to warn that a “crisis of confidence among Afghans” imperils the effort to rebuild the country. For most American troops, however, the only connection they have to the locals — whether soldiers in the Afghan army or villagers they’re trying to secure — is through their interpreters.

United States Army doctrine describes interpreters as “vital,” which is fairly obvious given the bevy of languages spoken in Afghanistan: Dari, Pashto, Tajik, Uzbek and others. Yet the way the military uses translators is too often haphazard and sometimes dangerously negligent. Many units consider interpreters to be necessary evils, and even those who are Americans of Afghan descent are often scorned or mistreated for being too obviously “different.”

Mission Essential Personnel, the primary contractor providing interpreters in Afghanistan, has basic guidelines: interpreters need to be given a place to sleep, for example, and fed. But beyond that, how they are treated is often left up to the individual unit. Many times, they are treated the way they should be: as vital members of a team. Sometimes, however, they are shockingly disrespected.

Earlier this year, I traveled through central Afghanistan as a civilian member of an American Provincial Reconstruction Team. We had a translator — we called her Brooklyn — who had been born and raised in California. During the initial briefing before our convoy set out, however, the team’s commander, an Air Force colonel, demanded that Brooklyn leave the briefing area, referring to her as “that local woman.”

The briefing slides were marked “SECRET,” which caused the colonel understandable alarm. Brooklyn, however, had a security clearance allowing her to be present. Perhaps the real problem was that she wore a headscarf, as one would expect a pious Muslim woman to do.

The next day, as we were driving between two bases, we ran into a traffic snarl at a bridge, with dozens of Afghan soldiers and police officers milling about. Our colonel, who had left his own translator back at his base, got out of his Humvee and asked Brooklyn to begin translating for him. After discussing the issue with the Afghan forces, she explained that they had found several bombs underneath the bridge, and were waiting for an American bomb disposal team to arrive. They had likely saved our lives, but we got that message only because we had an interpreter, the one the colonel had treated like an enemy spy the night before.

“Your interpreter is way more important than your weapon,” Cory Schulz, an Army major who led a tactical team embedded with Afghan troops in Paktika Province, told me. With an interpreter, he explained, you can command hundreds of Afghan soldiers; with a gun, you can only defend yourself.

Interpreters do more than talk and listen. Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, United States troops receive only minimal cultural training before they deploy. Thus interpreters often serve as cultural advisors — helping Americans learn the nuances of typical Afghan behavior.

Major Schulz said of his “terp,” as they’re often called, “he saved my life more than once.” Once the interpreter helped his unit identify a suicide bomber in a large crowd before the man could activate the explosives in his vest. The would-be bomber was acting nervously in a way that Afghans could recognize but that Americans were oblivious to, and the translator picked up on it.

American troops in some isolated parts of Afghanistan have little hope of such guidance. In March I met some officers at Bagram Air Force Base, north of Kabul, who were trying to find an interpreter who spoke Pashai; the Pashai represent only about 1 percent of Afghanistan’s population, but live in some of the most violent and insurgency-ridden areas of the country’s northeast.

Mission Essential Personnel couldn’t supply anyone who spoke the language, the officers told me, yet they felt that being able to speak to the Pashai could prove important for the war effort. So they went to the camp on the outskirts of Bagram where many interpreters live and found one who could speak the rare language. (Later I was told that he had been assigned to a battalion in Khost, 100 miles south of any Pashai-speaking areas, because he also spoke Pashto.)

American officers and enlisted soldiers repeatedly told me how vital interpreters are. Yet there remains no standardized way for units to use them, which can lead to insulting incidents like the one Brooklyn had to endure.

Often, the insults are more subtle, but more personal. In Khost Province, I met an interpreter named Afzal, who worked for a team of Army civilians doing economic and cultural research. Afzal had helped this team for several years, through three rotations of leadership and personnel. He had been trying for a long time to get a visa from the State Department to come to the United States, something many interpreters hope for because of threats to their families. Eventually, extremists began posting threatening letters on his door overnight.

Afzal told me that two years earlier, the team’s leader, a lieutenant colonel, had promised to submit the paperwork for the visa and vouch for his status as an interpreter, but he apparently never did. The next team leader, another officer, made the same promise, but also apparently never followed through. It was not until the arrival of the third team leader, a civilian, early this year that Afzal was able to submit his application. The delay has complicated the procedure — for this year the State Department cut the number of available visas for interpreters from Afghanistan and Iraq to 50 from 500.

As for winning the local population being the most important thing in counterinsurgency (or its center of gravity), I advocate the idea of lines of effort such that killing the insurgents is also similarly important.  But Joshua has it exactly right concerning the need for language training and good, reliable interpreters – interpreters who are paid and treated well.

This idea of dumb rules and interpreters not being allowed in the states is as old as the campaign in Iraq.  There is a robust discussion at the Small Wars Journal concerning whether this is a typical malady or an atypical occurrence.  I cannot provide any further guidance or detail concerning the frequency of problems.  I can say that in the campaign for Anbar, Iraq, interpreters for the Marines were considered Marines themselves.  That’s how well respected they were and how necessary their skills to the campaign.

Prior:

Lessons in COIN

Lousy Excuses Against Language Training for Counterinsurgency

The Enemy of My Enemy

Interpreters, Language and Counterinsurgency

There will be much more on McChrystal’s report to Gates in the coming days.  But my brief initial take is that there are parts of the assessment that aren’t serious.  It says “The ANSF is currently not large enough to cope with the demands of fighting the resilient insurgency in Afghanistan.”

The ANSF aren’t currently capable of fighting the insurgency in Afghanistan for reasons other than their size, as our coverage of the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police shows.  My assessment is that Afghanistan needs more qualified, less drug addicted, more dedicated, more professional forces.  In addition to this, the GNP of Afghanistan cannot support an ANSF as large at it currently is, much less larger.  Thus McChrystal’s advisors live in a daydream.  This doesn’t bode well for the balance of the study.

UPDATE:

Our friends at the Small Wars Journal have done a good roundup of initial reactions to McChrystal’s report to Gates.  Bill Roggio in particular reports that McChrystal to resign if not given resources for Afghanistan.  But this isn’t what the McClatchy report says.  They say that:

Three officers at the Pentagon and in Kabul told McClatchy that the McChrystal they know would resign before he’d stand behind a faltering policy that he thought would endanger his forces or the strategy.

This is a quite a bit different.  McChrystal has requested 45,000 additional troops.  He needs more – and he needs to rescind his tactical directive  before more Marines die as they did in Kunar.  The unintended consequences of lack of force projection (i.e., the remedy) will prove to be worse than the “disease” itself.  It will kill the patient.

In Bank of America Removes American Flags Honoring Dead Marine we briefly discussed the ugly incident where a BofA branch removed American flags honoring a U.S. Marine who had perished in Operation Enduring Freedom.  We demanded that a Bank of America executive weigh in with comments explaining the policy that required such a thing – or otherwise, why a branch manager would take it upon herself to do such a thing.  Whether the BofA executives have not read our demands or are just cowards is not yet clear.  But here is more to explain the ugly incident.  First is a video of part of the funeral procession.  The second is mostly audio explaining the incident itself.  You can be the judge.

Greenville, South Carolina saw the arrival of a Marine who perished in Afghanistan, and Gaffney, S.C. was his ultimate resting place.

Only the faint sound of lightly marching feet could be heard as hundreds stood silent on the Greenville-Spartanburg International tarmac Wednesday while fully adorned Marines carried Lance Cpl. Chris Fowlkes’ flag-draped coffin.

The solemn arrival began an afternoon-long procession that ultimately wound through the streets of the 20-year-old Marine’s hometown of Gaffney, where businesses shut down and mourners lined the streets.

The homecoming came six days after the former Gaffney High School football player died in a military hospital in Germany from injuries sustained a week earlier in an explosion in the Helman province of Afghanistan.

Well-wishers waved flags, saluted and shed tears as an army of police cars escorted Fowlkes’ family along the 40-mile stretch from the airport to the town.

Lance Corporal Chris Fowlkes was a popular and well known young man in Gaffney, and a brave warrior who gave his life in the service of his country.  It was seemingly a very heart-felt and patriotic funeral procession.  But all was not well in Gaffney, S.C.

A South Carolina Bank of America branch is drawing criticism Thursday after an employee reportedly ordered the removal of American flags placed to honor a fallen Marine over fears that people would be offended.

The Palmetto Scoop received one eyewitness email claiming that the branch manager at Bank of America’s Gaffney branch at 1602 West Floyd Baker Blvd. “told a citizen who was preparing the route for a U.S. Marine killed in action in Afghanistan by placing small American flags along the roadway that the flags might upset some of her customers.”

Said the outraged tipster, “[The branch manager] took them down and made the citizen go in to get them if she didn’t want them thrown away.”

The flags were part of the funeral procession of Lance Corporal Christopher Fowlkes, 20, who died last week after an explosion in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

WSPA-TV has also received similar tips about the “flag flap.”

A teller at the branch confirmed to TPS that the branch manager had been there around the time of the incident but had left for the day.

Bank of America released a statement apologizing for the incident and celled it a misunderstanding.

“We want to ensure the community knows how deeply proud we are of the men and women who have sacrificed so much in service to our country,” the statement said. “The bank does fly the American Flag at our locations throughout the country and flags were displayed in front of our banking center in Gaffney the evening prior to our dedicated Marine returning home.”

UPDATE: WCBD in Charleston reports that Bank of America said the incident was a “miscommunication in corporate policy.” That raises the question, which policy would require employees to remove American flags that are part of a funeral procession for a fallen Marine?

One commenter says “You Lie.”  The branch in Lexington [Main Street, Lexington, South Carolina, United States of America] refuses to fly the flag the tellers tell me they have on site. The flag pole has been naked for over 2 years now. It is a disgrace, and a poke in the eye.”

So should BofA rename their corporation to bank of Russia?  Is it Bank of America, or is it not?  With whose offense were they worried?  Really.  Who, exactly, would have come into the bank and demanded that an American flag be removed for a Marine who perished in Afghanistan?  And why would Bank of AMERICA have cared?

What corporate policy was in effect?  Was this a branch-specific issue, or is there a corporate policy that forbids the displaying of American flags for the fear of causing offense?  Who was responsible for removing the flags?  Has corporate policy been changed?  If so, why was the policy in effect?  If not, what is the justification for the policy?  Will Bank of AMERICA issue a formal apology to the Fowlkes family first and then to AMERICA?

There are many unanswered questions concerning this ugly incident.  I feel that it’s necessary for a BofA official to formally comment on this article to enlighten my readers.

In the mean time, my most sincere condolences goes out to the Fowlkes family.  God be with you through this most difficult time.

Briefly following up on Taliban Ambush in Eastern Kunar Kills Four U.S. Marines, we know now that there will be an investigation of this incident reviewing whether the ROE was a contributing cause to four Marines perishing.  There have been some blog posts and other discussion forums questioning the veracity of the reporting done that day by McClatchy.  Christian at Defense Tech (whom I respect) says Jonathan Landay with McClatchy is ”a well-respected journalist whom I’ve known for years.”  I see absolutely no reason prima facie to doubt the veracity or accuracy of the report.

If the report had vacillated I would be less strident about this incident.  But the report was clear.  The Marines were under fire and demanded artillery not once, but twice.  They were denied artillery and CAS not once,  but twice – for the stated reason that the ROE didn’t allow it.

McChrystal has released his tactical directive, but let’s be clear about this.  There is what is written on paper and the unwritten context.  Here is the unwritten context.

“If you are in a situation where you are under fire from the enemy… if there is any chance of creating civilian casualties or if you don’t know whether you will create civilian casualties, if you can withdraw from that situation without firing, then you must do so,” said McChrystal.

There is always a chance.  Always.  But here is something that has no chance of happening.  No investigation will find that a tactical directive written or endorsed by a four star general was responsible for anything bad.  The directive will be exonerated and the field grade officers responsible for denying artillery had better begin looking for another line of work.

You heard it here first.