The Registan blog has a great article on mistreatment of interpreters (‘terps):
Earlier this year, I was going out on a patrol through central Afghanistan with some colleagues. We were hitching a ride with the local PRT. As is normal, the night before the patrol, we all gathered near the PRT operations center for a briefing on what to encounter. The colonel running the PRT saw us cultural advisers coming and flattened his lips. While giving the weather report, our interpreter came up.
Now this interpreter was an American, born and raised in Sacramento, to parents originally from an Eastern majority-Pashtun province. She could speak Pashto reasonably well, and was steadily improving. She also had a Secret security clearance, so she could participate in mission briefings without any concerns about operational security. She also wore a scarf around her head, as is generally considered normal for a modest Muslim woman.
To this PRT colonel, however, that meant Terrorist. He wouldn’t let her near the open-air briefing, demanding, despite our protestations, that she basically sit in a corner while we went over such top secret information as which route we’d be traveling along (there is only one road between the two bases we’d be visiting), how sunny it would be, and who would be in which Humvee. She just had to find out where she was riding later.
And that’s a Damn Big Problem.
It’s a Damn Big Problem, especially in Afghanistan, because ‘terps are either from the local population or, as the lady in the article, born to a family from the local population. The Pashtunwali, the ancient code that governs life, love, politics, organisation and war for the Pashto people, does not discriminate - all Pashtuns are, at least in a metaphysical sense, ‘equal’. Pashtunwali does not discriminate between tribal leaders and their followers, between the poor and the rich or between the Pashto within and those outside their original land. To the local population, a Sacramento-born Pashto interpreter is as Pashto as they themselves.
The way Western forces treat their local colleagues, workers and, not the least, ‘terps displays to the locals how, on their view, they would think of, act towards, and treat the entire people. In a 4GW world, ‘terps are not walking dictionaries, they are trusted third parties between the local uncommitted and the occupying force. Mistreating them, quite apart from being immoral considering the risks adjuvant to doing a ‘terp’s work in still loosely Taliban-controlled areas, negates their strategic role as links between the local uncommitted and the occupying force that reaches back to a millennium-old cultural heritage.
A footnote after the fact: I typed up this post about a week ago and put it into the queue. When I re-read it in the queue, I realised that unwittingly, I was using the COIN community’s (and probably most of the armed forces’, at least insofar as unofficial use was concerned) shorthand for interpreters, ‘terp. There is a bit of a divergence of opinion about whether that is a derogatory term or a convenient shorthand. It certainly is homophonic to ‘twerp’, a rather uncomplimentary expression. The few people I talked about this a while back seemed to suggest that it isn’t meant to be derogatory, at least not in Afghanistan (there seems to be anecdotal evidence that it isn’t offensive in Afghanistan, but is a bit more so in Iraq). ‘Terps put a lot on the line. They live under constant threats as ‘collaborators’ with the Western forces, and only few of them are granted favourable resettlement to the United States to protect them from Taliban/AQI attacks. But even so, losing one’s home is a heavy price to pay for assisting an invading force. Sometimes, maybe, the problem lies in the misappreciation of the entirely different, but no less serious, risks ‘terps are exposed to.
