Used Up

This is a profound national embarrassment. The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus reports this morning that the State Department “has stopped processing the applications of 551 Iraqi and Afghan translators seeking special visas to come to the United States, because the current legal quota of 500 visas for the program this year is about to be reached.”

The halt is the latest obstacle for many of the several thousand translators who have worked for U.S. military units in Iraq and Afghanistan, risking their lives and leaving their families vulnerable to retaliation from insurgents who see them as accomplices of American troops. More than 250 interpreters working for U.S. forces or their contractors have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Many American service members have worked to help their former translators gain a visa to come to the United States under a 2006 congressional program initially designed to admit 50 translators per year, a quota later increased to 500.

I’ve seen these interpreters in action, and simply put, the American military would be lost without them. During my last embed in Iraq, I spent quite a bit of time with Iraqi interpreters employed by the U.S. Army and heard their stories. None of them—not one—can tell their family or friends what they do for a living, for fear of winding up dead for helping the Americans. The normal routine seems to be that they tell friends and family that they have a job (for a bank, for example) that forces them to travel to different parts of the country every couple weeks. They live on base with our troops for a week or two at a time, then go home for a week, then back out to the base. The travel back and forth is as dangerous for them as heading out on patrol with American units. And for this, we’re telling them “thanks, but no thanks.”

The terps have been thoroughly vetted by American forces, and by virtue of being out with the troops on missions, assume all the risks that American forces do. They’re not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts—they’re paid well by Iraqi standards, and at least among the guys I talked to, have aspirations to move to the United States or Canada as soon as they save enough to make the trip. And now the State department is shutting the door on them.

New Yorker writer George Packer recently wrote a play about our abandonment of Iraqi terps, called “Betrayed,” which he wrote by incorporating the real words of the many terps he interviewed for a story about them for the New Yorker in March, 2007.

The terps are in much the same position as Iraqis who work as stringers and reporters for western news agencies,who I profiled two years ago for the Columbia Journalism Review. I traveled to Iraq for the story, sat down for numerous interviews with these brave Iraqis, and time and again was told stories made up of equal parts fear, deception, and bravery. I wrote that they’re

forced to lead painful and dangerous double lives. One woman, whom I’ll call Salama, told me that although she has been working for American newspapers for over three years, her friends and neighbors don’t know about it. “My colleagues here don’t tell their neighbors they work for an American news agency either,” she said. As we sat in one of the hotel rooms that her news organization occupies in Baghdad — there are armed guards in the lobby and security in the room next door — she told me that she explains her long days at the office to neighbors and friends by telling them she works for a financial company with branches around the world, so she has to work late because of the time differences.

…Like Salama, Yousif is discreet about his work. “Ninety-five percent of my friends — close friends — don’t know I work with journalists,” said Yousif, who is fluent in English and began working for his American employer as the bureau’s IT manager. “It’s very dangerous to tell people you’re doing this. I tell them I’m working for a computer company.”

Bringing this danger into focus, one of the Iraqis I wrote about, Salih Saif Aldin, was shot dead at point-blank range on a Baghdad street last October.

The refusal of the American government to help those who have helped us so much isn’t happening in a vacuum. It has the potential to have far-reaching consequences as we continue to work in Iraq, Afghanistan and in other parts of the world where we need the assistance of English-speaking locals. From a “hearts and minds” perspective, the short-sighted refusal of Washington to live up to our moral commitment to these interpreters is devastating. The terps are trusted enough to live side-by-side with American troops on base, and we trust them enough to translate properly and coherently, but apparently we don’t trust them enough to save their lives.

Comments

[David M]

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 03/03/2008 News and Personal dispatches from the front lines.
http://thunderrun.blogspot.com/2008/03/from-front-03032008.html