Study Urdu or Pashto for Afghanistan?

Training Training and Tactics
1

Question for those with OEF Experience-

If you had the choice between studying Urdu or Pashto prior to your deployment, which would you have chosen?

If it helps, I’ve had 3 semesters of Arabic.

I’m asking because I’m in my third year at West Point, and my schedule has begun to lighten a little academically, so I now have the time to begin to look into it. I also figure it would be a skillset that would be better to start looking into it now instead of in a couple of years when I’m an LT a couple of months out from a deployment, with a million other things to worry about. Thank you for your insight.

2

If you’re good with languages and want something that will serve you OK across a wide area, consider Turkish. You’ll have some degree of understanding across all Turkic languages.

IMHO Afghanistan is played out. Unless you have a specific assignment or speciality lined up, I’d focus somewhere else. If Uncle Sugar wants you to learn Urdu, they’ll send you to DLI.

3

Three semesters of college arabic will actually transfer to Pashto as well as Arabic… You’ll still get schooled by the specialists who failed out of first semester Arabic at DLI, but that’s all you’ll need for basic Pashto (beyond that, the higher level vocab is all that transfers)

Pashto without a doubt, that and some Dari (if you think you’ll end up in Kandahar province), otherwise, the farther north you end up (Konar and north, especially up to Ningahah - where most instructors are from, it’s pure Pakhto/Pashto)

DLI (Monterey or Washtington) is where they’d send you, in practical terms you’d be most likely to be pushed into the Af-Pak hands program (since you already know the script, you’d be ahead in that regard), but it’s only a 16wk program, is only oriented towards being able to handle ILR Level 1 conversational topics and survival/tactical level stuff. Great program for what it is, and you’d shine at that, but it essentially takes you only as far as glad-handing in the bazaar, and meet and greets with local elders.

You have access to the Rosetta Stone applications, and there is DLI Head-Start material out there (quickest way to learn the other 7 letters you’ll have to pick up, and maybe get some pronunciation guide stuff). Rosetta stone sucks, most of the DLI materials are tailored to language maintenance (and aren’t very good at that), and jumping right into reading VOA or BBC Pashto is going to be a huge stretch.

Afghanistan is hardly played out - we’ll still need huge amounts of people who are able to interact with locals and work on reconstruction projects, even if the troop # footprint has dropped, the guys who speak the language and understand the culture will still be in demand.

4

I’ll agree, Pashtu and Dari are the way to go. There are alot of others spoken, Nuristani and Korengali are 2 examples, but pashtu and dari are by far the 2 most common

5

The Army wants troops to learn Dari and Pashto. There is now the Rapport Program that you will have to pass before you deploy.

http://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2010/11/09/

The Army seems to think Dari is the official language of Afghanistan and the Army emphasizes it. If you find yourself operating in the dangerous parts of Afghanistan you will find Pashto to be more useful.

6

Dari is really useful if you want something to build on. The written form is very similar to regular Farsi and almost anyone who a little bit educated speaks a little of it. Pashto is what they speak south of the Hindu Kush down to Pakistan, there’s not much literature but it’s what a lot of the people speak where the “action” is. Balochi is spoken in the way southwest, I dont really know anything about it.

7

Pashto would be my choice, I took the SOLT class for Arabic and it was awsome. On deployment to Iraq for the surge it was invaluable as we were able to have one Arabic speeker and an interpiter on every team. I was able to pick up things just standing on the corner that my terp didnt have time for from kids.

I had not attended the course when I deployed to OEF but a buddy had gone to DLI and was able to find a great many an afghan who spoke Arabic dont over look its value on the battle field (think mullas and radio chatter). It has great value as well as some russian. The russian is esential if your looking for ammo in a bunker it will help with identification, so you dont walk off with a case of zero fuse granades thinking its ak ammo.

8

imo, the best ethnologue’s of Trashcanistan are :

There are some 40 languages & approx. 200 dialects there.

Pashto, Eastern Farsi are most prevalent & Pashayi, Dari would comprise some as well.

Urdu, Tajik, Wakhi & Uzbek (Ozbeki), Darwazi et alia & “other” tribal dialects are not as prevalent as the aformentioned.

Kinda, sorta depends on where your AO is as well…

HTH…

9

The uses honestly vary too. Dari is primarily used for official communication, high level speeches, and when conferring anything among the educated withing Afghanistan. At field grade and higher levels, knowing Dari is a LOT more practical as a base. The more educated will know and understand Arabic (typically Mullahs, Mulawei), but there’s a pretty wide spectrum of those who can understand and regurgitate some of the fusha found in the Quran, and those who actually can converse in Arabic.

As the company level and lower, odds are the shared Dari won’t be worth nearly as much as a fairly basic wide Pashto/Pakhto base, despite a lot of the differences that can exist village to village in mountainous areas, the Pashto will absolutely be the most useful. For Sigint, Pashto and some Dari is what we need, but instead we get a lot of Farsi/Dari speakers who can rely on shared vocabulary and some syntax understanding to get by, but the net result on our end is mediocre translation without the military understanding of what kind of conversations are going on - a military tactical linguist with limited training is worth 4x as much as the contractors we get through MEP and pay 200k/yr for.
Whenever radio chatter consists of Arabic, it’s always something directly from the Quran (usually poorly translated, or used as coverterm). Valuable - yes, but outside my job I wouldn’t put much focus on it at all.

That Baluch/Baloch/Baluchi, and Brahui, as well as other lower density languages do exist down south (southern Helmand, southwestern Kandahar, and Pakistan out towards Girdi Jangle), but expertise and training is damn scarce, and most of our dealings with Baloch that far south in the Helmand valley, the guys we care about speak other languages anyway. I wouldn’t worry about it, since the good English/Brahui or other sorts of speakers are literally hard to find on the globe.

Further north Tajik may become practical, although the most exposure I got to that was the Hazara guys in the ANA, who all spoke very good Dari, and some Pashto, and even had a pretty good working understanding of Arabic.

Urdu may exist, but won’t be particularly useful, certainly nothing in the area that ISAF operates where spending resources learning Urdu should come before mastering Pashto, Dari, then Arabic and Tajik.

As far as the dialects and diversity of those - it’s absolutely ridiculous how fast dialects can diverge when the entire culture doesn’t revolve around written language, to the point where villages 5km from each other can have linguistic misunderstandings.