Category Archives: Central Asia

by | 10 July 2026 · 3:21 pm

Post-Soviet Nations and NATO

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle pp. 82-84:

As far as Russia was concerned, the victory of the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine was a major blow to the Kremlin’s interests at home and abroad. “It was our 9/11,” declared the Russian political adviser Gleb Pavlovsky, who was close to the Kremlin. A native of Ukraine, he went to Kyiv to advise Prime Minister Yanukovych and his campaign. The Orange Revolution was also a personal defeat for Putin because it was supported by Boris Berezovsky, his onetime sponsor, later nemesis, and ultimately refugee from his regime. The Kremlin was concerned that under the Western-leaning President Yushchenko, Ukraine might leave the Russian orbit forever and join the Western camp.

With the fall of communism, democratic rule became a prerequisite for post-communist and post-Soviet states aspiring to join Western institutions, both political, like the European Union, and military, NATO in particular. Ukraine, with its chaotic but viable democracy, could be a candidate for both, while Russia, failing one democracy test after another and eventually setting on the path of authoritarian rule, could not. The success and durability of Ukrainian democracy was a threat to the Putin regime, since it encouraged whatever remained of the pro-democratic forces in Russia and, in geopolitical terms, brought democratic institutions closer to Russia’s borders. In Putin’s eyes, this was not just undesirable but unacceptable.

By 2004, Putin was well on the way to laying the foundations for a future autocratic regime. He took control of the Russian Duma in the December 2003 elections, which saw his party, United Russia, obtain three times as many votes as the communists to become the largest party in parliament. He then exploited a hostage crisis produced by Chechen radicals who attacked a school in Beslan in September 2004. It was mishandled by the Russian security services, whose personnel stormed the school, contributing to the death of 314 hostages, including 186 schoolchildren. This gave Putin an opportunity to intervene and curtail whatever remained of Russian democracy: elections of regional governors were abolished, and new laws were introduced curtailing the activities of political parties and NGOs.

Putin was eager to see a similar political system installed in Ukraine, openly campaigning for Yanukovych and secretly pushing Kuchma toward the use of force. He failed on both counts. In early 2005, mass protests also shook a number of other post-Soviet countries, including Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, where the “Tulip Revolution” unseated the local ruler, Askar Akayev, who had been in power since the late Soviet period. A year before the Orange Revolution, the “Revolution of Roses” in Georgia had brought to power a young, charismatic, pro-Western reformer named Mikheil Saakashvili. In Russia, all these protest movements were labeled “Orange.” Finding itself on the defensive, Moscow began to mimic the tactics used by the opposition during the Orange Revolution, creating and funding numerous pro-government youth organizations, the most notorious of which was “Nashi,” or “Ours.” “Ours” were there to defend the president against revolutionary upheaval, allegedly promoted by foreign powers. Ukraine was singled out in that regard, but behind Ukraine Moscow ideologues saw the threatening shadow of the West.

Indeed, as expected in Moscow, the Orange Revolution produced a major geopolitical shift in Kyiv. President Yushchenko returned to the pro-European policies launched by Kuchma before the Melnychenko tapes scandal of 2001. Those included gradual integration into European structures, from the European Union to NATO. Yushchenko wanted an invitation to join the alliance in the form of a Membership Action Plan, or MAP. His requests did not fall on deaf ears in Brussels, as NATO officials invited Ukraine to begin an Intensified Dialogue on possible membership. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland, Ukraine’s western neighbors who had not wanted their efforts to join NATO to be compromised by association with Ukraine in the 1990s, now all supported Ukraine’s aspirations to membership. They were only too happy to yield their position on NATO’s eastern flank, vulnerable to possible Russian attack, to Ukraine.

In February 2022, a few weeks after his inauguration, Yushchenko attended a meeting of heads of state of NATO member nations in Brussels, where he publicly declared that he wanted his colleagues to regard Ukraine as a future member of the alliance. He did so in the name of the Orange Revolution that he had led and the people who had elected him to the presidency. “I’m pretty much sure, dear friends,” began Yushchenko, “that the people who went onto Kyiv’s squares and streets were motivated because they wanted to see Ukraine in Europe, not as a neighbor of Europe, because we are a country located in the center of Europe. And we would like to see Ukraine integrated into the European Union and into the North Atlantic Alliance.” Before leaving the podium, Yushchenko went out of his way to reassure Russia that his NATO aspirations and those of his country were not directed against Russia. “Russia is our strategic partner,” declared Yushchenko, “and Ukraine’s policy toward NATO will by no means be against the interests of other countries, including Russia.”

Ukraine was trying to solve its security dilemma as best it could. Since NATO had established a strategic partnership with Russia, the idea of Ukraine’s acceding to NATO without antagonizing Russia was theoretically feasible in the 1990s. But in the wake of the Orange Revolution, Kyiv faced a difficult choice: either to accommodate Moscow, which had long-standing territorial claims on Ukraine and had intervened directly in that country’s presidential elections, or to seek protection in a military alliance that could guarantee its territorial integrity and sovereignty. The threat from Russia was real and immediate, while membership in NATO was hypothetical and removed in time. After long vacillation, Kyiv opted decisively for NATO.

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Filed under Central Asia, Czechia, democracy, Europe, Hungary, military, nationalism, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine, USSR

by | 9 July 2026 · 5:41 am

Post-USSR Territorial Disputes

From The Russo-Ukraine War: The Return of History, by Serhii Plokhy (W. W. Norton, 2023), Kindle p. 65:

Territorial disputes are a hallmark of imperial disintegration, and the fall of the USSR was no exception. The Russian government had been challenging Ukraine’s territorial integrity even before it became legally independent and left the Soviet Union. The first challenge to the Ukrainian borders came from the democratic government of Russia almost immediately after the Ukrainian parliament declared the country’s independence on August 24, 1991. Two days later the Russian president’s spokesman, Pavel Voshchanov, made a statement on behalf of his superior.

“In the most recent days, state sovereignty has been declared and withdrawal from the USSR announced in a series of Union republics,” read the statement. “In that regard, I have been empowered by the President of the RSFSR to make the following declaration. The Russian Federation casts no doubt on the constitutional right of every state and people to self-determination. But there is the problem of borders, which may prove to be unregulated, a condition admissible only if provision is made for Union relations secured by an appropriate treaty. Should they be abrogated, the RSFSR reserves the right to pose the question of revision of borders.”

The statement was addressed to every Soviet republic that might declare its independence of the Soviet Union. But when Voshchanov was asked by journalists to be more specific, he singled out Ukraine and Kazakhstan. “If those republics enter into a union with Russia, then there is no problem,” he explained. “But if they withdraw, then we must be concerned about the population living there and not forget that those lands were colonized by Russians. Russia will hardly agree to give them away so easily.” Both Ukraine and Kazakhstan had large ethnic Russian minorities, and both republics, Ukraine in its entirety, and Kazakhstan in its northern lands, were eyed as parts of a future Russian state by no less a figure than Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose article advocating the creation of such a state had been published by the major Soviet newspapers the previous year.

Kyiv and Almaty protested, obliging Yeltsin to dissociate himself from Voshchanov’s remarks. The spokesman was portrayed as someone who had got out of control and presented his personal views rather than the policy of Yeltsin’s administration. But Voshchanov had in fact formulated the new policy of the Russian Federation for years to come. Treaties recognizing the borders of Union republics like the one signed between Russia and Ukraine in 1990 applied only if the republics, Ukraine in particular, remained in union with Russia. The understanding of what such union meant would change over time, from Gorbachev’s Soviet Union to Yeltsin’s Commonwealth of Independent States and, eventually, a number of Eurasian projects advanced by Putin. Models and rulers changed, but the basic principle remained the same: Russia’s recognition of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the post-Soviet states would be conditional on alliance with Moscow.

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Filed under Central Asia, nationalism, Russia, Ukraine, USSR

by | 4 March 2025 · 4:58 am

PTSD vs. Moral Injury

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 222-224:

ACCORDING TO MY OFFICIAL Air Force records, I do not have, and in fact have never had, PTSD. Formally receiving this diagnosis would have required an official admission that what I did and saw and heard was in fact traumatic and that it wasn’t normal, which would only have served to justify my reasons for not wanting to go back. You can see why the powers that be wouldn’t want to admit this. And while this diagnosis wasn’t true when the Air Force made it, it might be now. Time doesn’t heal all wounds—some simply can’t be treated—but eventually your mind can bring the edges together, and while the scar is ugly and imprecise, the gaping hole has, finally, closed. These days I can listen to Pashto without breaking out in a cold sweat, get on a plane without thinking about the guns that ought to be attached to it, and talk about war without wanting to curl up in a ball and die. This, then, is understood as meaning that my PTSD has been cured (never mind that curing something that was never supposed to have existed creates some mild metaphysical stickiness).

In the time since I wasn’t diagnosed, the military has embraced a different terminology to attempt to describe the turmoil that I and so many others experienced: moral injury. The idea of moral injury has been around since at least the 1980s, though the explicit term was coined by Jonathan Shay in the nineties, when his work with Vietnam veterans led to his writing Achilles in Vietnam. Today, Syracuse University’s Moral Injury Project not only defines moral injury but attempts to explain why and when it happens:

Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.

This is a good definition; it is thorough while simultaneously casting a wide enough net to embrace the myriad reasons any warfighter could suffer such an injury. Being a DSO allowed for perpetration, witnessing, and failure. Certainly, my moral code was violated. But I don’t think moral injury fully encompasses just what happened. It’s not that I, along with almost every other Pashto DSO, wasn’t morally injured. We were. But it’s not entirely accurate to say that there was “damage done to [my] conscience or moral compass.” It’s more like, along with the many men I killed, my consciousness was blown the fuck up.

With the exception of spies mythical and real, most warfighters throughout history have not been tasked with killing people they know. Even in our modern wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the majority of killing is done by complete strangers. There is, I assume, a feeling of knowing associated with killing someone in close combat, even though you may have no knowledge of anything that defines that person as a unique human. But this is different from understanding what makes that person a person, from killing someone you know. With modernity came the ability to have this knowledge.

The most famous of these warriors are drone operators. These men and women face issues that I can’t begin to understand, as the cognitive dissonance that they experience is so strange as to be something out of science fiction. If anything, it seems that their injury is arguably worsened by the moral contradiction of being so far away from the “threat.”

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Filed under Afghanistan, military, religion, U.S., Vietnam, war

by | 3 March 2025 · 4:51 am

Problems of Knowing Thine Enemy

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 230-234:

No single individual is held responsible for the people that our planes kill. It’s a crew effort. There is no ammunition without a loadmaster to balance the plane; a FCO [Fire Control Officer] can’t fire that ammunition without gunners loading the weapons; the gunners won’t ready the weapons till the sensor operators find a bad guy; the sensor operators couldn’t find that bad guy without pilots flying the plane; the pilots couldn’t have flown the plane to the location where the sensors found that bad guy without a navigator guiding them across the country; the navigator couldn’t have safely gotten across that country without an EWO [Electronic Warfare Officer] making sure no one hit the plane with a rocket; the EWO couldn’t have used his equipment without a flight engineer making sure everything was in working order.

I didn’t mention the role of DSOs because DSOs, while nice to have around, are not remotely necessary for a C-130 to carry out its mission. And so, if I heard something that proved to be the key piece of information that resulted in us shooting, a piece of information, that, if lacking, would have prevented us from shooting, then didn’t I kill someone on my own? Conversely, if I didn’t hear anything that was related to why we shot, then did I kill anyone at all?

The problem with this argument is that according to my official records I have in fact killed 123 people. The actual wording is “123 insurgents EKIA” (EKIA = enemy killed in action, so not quite people, but definitely killed). These records don’t say that I was part of a crew that killed these people, or that I supported other people who did the killing, just that I killed those 123 humans. I can’t know, and will never know, if all of these kills belong to me. I do know, and will always know, that I belong to all of them.

…

These are the things I wish I hadn’t heard.

If I hadn’t heard those things, infinity would have remained, well, infinite. I would have been able to tell myself that the Taliban were not men, were not even human, that they were in fact Enemies, whose only purpose was to be Killed in Action. If I hadn’t heard those things, I wouldn’t have loved the men I was listening to. If I hadn’t loved them, killing them would have been easy. If killing them had been easy, my consciousness would have remained intact.

To say that I loved the Taliban is surely anathema to most anyone who reads this. It doesn’t feel good, or right, for me to say it. But I checked, and of the many definitions that exist for the word love, one of them is the following: “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.” I most certainly had personal ties to the men I was listening to; they told me shit they wouldn’t tell their best (non-Talib) friends, their wives, their fathers. And at some point, not because they were Talibs, in fact in spite of that, because they were human, I came to have the strong affection for them that I firmly believe it is impossible not to develop for virtually any other person if you can get past your own bullshit and just accept that they’re people too.

Let me be clear about something here: I in no way support the Taliban, their stated goals, their practices, or really anything about them. Nor do I support the individual men who comprise the greater Taliban. Their movement and many of their beliefs are an affront to modernity in all of its complicated, messy, but ultimately better than the shit that actively and gleefully removes myriad human rights from everyone who isn’t a God-fearing man, splendor. They are not the good guys.

None of these things detract from the fact that they’re still human. They’re still people. I have no desire for you to identify with them or wish for their lives to be spared. What I do ask is that you understand that I did identify with them. I had to. My job required it. All that talking with my teachers in language school, so I could figure out how they think? That’s what made me a good linguist. The translation we did isn’t something that can be done by a computer or a robot, it isn’t the simple transformation of the sounds of one language into another. You have to understand the intent, the tone, the playfulness, the fear, the anger, the confusion, all of the nuances that attach themselves to spoken words and drastically change their meanings.

It was impossible for me to do this without internalizing the speakers’ logic (it’s possible for others, but I don’t understand that process). It was also impossible, despite all this knowing and feeling, for me to wish for their lives to have been spared. To have spared their lives would have been to guarantee that many others would have been taken.

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by | 2 March 2025 · 5:36 am

Pashto Regionalects

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 161-162:

The Whiskeys [MC-130W] were becoming the new hotness. On my first deployment, we were usually just tasked to whichever flight didn’t conflict with our crew rest. Now, as more commanders became aware of the Whiskeys, and the presence of DSOs [Direct Support Officers] on the Whiskeys, we started being requested for specific missions. But there was no way we could fly on every mission that wanted us; there simply weren’t enough DSOs to go around.

As far as we could tell, the people requesting us had no idea that Pashto varies massively depending on where you are in Afghanistan. This was strange, or, really, plain ignorant, as anyone with a cursory knowledge of the language should know that at baseline it has two main dialects that pronounce entire letters differently. Hell, some of the people who speak it don’t even call it Pashto. They call it Pakhto. The second letter in the word پښتو, that little collection of three nubs with the one dot above it and one below it, ښ, can be pronounced as either a sh sound (though you have to curl your tongue to the top of your mouth to get the sh just right) or a kh sound (same tongue movement). There’s another letter that on one side of the country is pronounced as a g and on the other side as a zh. The “o” in Pashto isn’t always an o, sometimes it’s a u, as in Pashtu/Pakhtu.

And those are just the two major divisions, Western and Eastern Pashto/Pakhto/Pashtu/Pakhtu. Realistically there are dozens of dialects, some of which aren’t understood all that well even by native Pashto speakers. So, to expect us to be able to fly over bumfuck Khost and have any clue as to what the bad guys were saying was to have no idea of how the language worked. Which, I guess, we shouldn’t have been surprised by. Unrealistic expectations being the norm in Afghanistan.

Flying in places where we couldn’t understand anything that was being said was both a serious waste of us as a resource and, more importantly, at least to us, boring as fuck. Like anything that you do every day, even flying eventually loses its excitement. After enough missions, all you’re doing is sitting in a tiny chair for six or seven hours waiting for something to happen. The fact that you’re fifteen or twenty thousand feet in the air traveling at two hundred plus miles an hour falls by the wayside. Those hours are short if you’re busy listening to guys planning attacks or actually fighting. They’re a little longer if all you’re doing is listening to them bullshit. But those six or seven hours feel like an eternity if what you’re supposed to be listening to is utterly incomprehensible. What’s a DSO to do?

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by | 1 March 2025 · 10:11 am

USAF DSO Job Description

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 2-4:

A DSO [Direct Support Operator] (pronounced “dizzo”) is just an airborne cryptologic linguist by another name. Historically, there weren’t very many DSOs, mostly because the Air Force didn’t want or need that many, and partly because DSOs like feeling special, so they artificially limited the number of spots available to other non-DSO linguists. And because there were so few DSOs, it was that much easier to craft an image as badass “operators,” the best of the best, the only people who could do what they do. This was plausible; there are those elite groups within the military who have been selected for their talent, grit, and exceptionalism. And, like those elite groups, if you pushed the DSOs on it, they would be able to credibly say that because their job was highly classified (true) they couldn’t tell you specifically what they did (untrue).

A DSO does what all airborne linguists do. They “translate intelligence communications or data received or intercepted while in the air,” aka listen to what the bad guys (usually) are saying in another language and turn it into English (that quote is from the USAF’s Quincy, Massachusetts, recruiter’s Facebook page). Most airborne linguists do this aboard a jumbo jet, the RC-135 Rivet Joint, or RJ, flying thirty thousand or so feet above the ground at four or five hundred miles an hour, in an orbit that encompasses a few hundred miles. This is strategic work; the communications they receive or interpret rarely have an immediate impact on something actively happening on the ground. But it is important, at least according to the military, as “a lot of the things we do might end up on the desk of the president” (ibid., and a little misleading, though technically not a lie if you note the usage of “might”).

The primary difference between these linguists and DSOs is one of location. DSOs don’t fly on RC-135s, or any similar massive aircraft. DSOs fly exclusively on the planes that are utilized by Air Force Special Operations Command, or AFSOC. For the most part, these are C-130s that have been modified for various purposes. Some of these, like the AC-130s, or gunships, have been changed so much from their original cargo-carrying mission as to be unrecognizable; the only cargo a gunship carries is bullets. Others, like the MC-130s, still can and do carry cargo, but they’ve been made to be better at doing it. [Later MC-130Ws, nicknamed Whiskeys, were modified to carry weapons.] AFSOC has other aircraft that DSOs are trained to fly on, but in my time in Afghanistan, we almost exclusively flew on C-130s.

Timing is the other thing that makes a DSO’s work different from that of other linguists. AFSOC doesn’t do strategic work all that often, and so neither do DSOs. In Afghanistan, our job was to “provide real-time threat warning” to the planes we were on and to the people on the ground that these planes were supporting. How we did this work is unimportant, and honestly quite boring.

I don’t know if they still think of themselves as badasses, but when I was a DSO, that was the ethos of the community. We (not all, but most of us) felt that we were the best of the best: better than other linguists, cooler than other linguists, more important than other linguists. Once upon a time, some of this may have been true. Long before I did it, in order to be a DSO you had to be very good at the language(s) you spoke, and you had to be handpicked by other DSOs, interviewed, and tested; it was a whole process. And there were those DSOs who flew scary, complex missions in dangerous places. But by 2010 the Air Force just randomly assigned new linguists to become DSOs, and the thing most likely to take down the aircraft a DSO was in was a drone (seriously, they have a bad habit of losing connection and orbiting at preselected altitudes that are, let’s say, inconvenient for other, human-containing aircraft).

The U.S. Air Force students in the Romanian-language class ahead of me at the Defense Language Institute in 1969-1970 were assigned to an airbase in Turkey, where they listened constantly to Romanian-language radio broadcasts and recorded any that contained reference to military assets or movements, which were then translated. The two other Army students, one in the class ahead of me and one in my class, were both assigned to Military Intelligence units. The one in my class went to Germany and did some undercover work. The only other person in my 3-person Romanian class was an FBI agent from Chicago who probably didn’t get much more use out of his new language skills than I did as a company clerk in Ft. Gordon, Georgia.

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by | 27 February 2025 · 5:09 am

Learning Pashto Through Dari

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 64-69:

S. and V. didn’t speak Dari, and it turned out neither did anyone else. The course wasn’t a turbo course, it was just abbreviated, a way to teach some army sergeants the fundamentals of Pashto before sending them back to their posts to keep learning the rest of the language. For Taylor and me, this meant that after the first two months we were leaps and bounds beyond four of our classmates. But there was a fifth who was a brilliant linguist. Ty too had thought this would be a turbo class, and even though it wasn’t, he was still expected to pass the Pashto DLPT by the end of the course. (The Defense Language Proficiency Test is the standardized exam used by the Department of Defense to assess an individual’s competency in a language. At the time, roughly 50 percent of people who took the full yearlong Pashto course failed it.) Ty took a monastic approach to language learning and after class would spend two hours reading one news article, looking up every single word. With this effort, while he wasn’t quite at our level—we had that whole 30 percent of the vocabulary and an extra year of experience with the vagaries of Afghan language thing going for us—he too was ahead of the rest of our classmates.

…

I was spitballing, as I hadn’t fully fleshed out these thoughts back then, I just felt that the Dari word made more sense. As the course progressed, this kept happening. I think, in large part, this was due to the shared words between the languages; instead of having to spend hour upon hour learning new words, I was afforded the luxury of really trying to understand how Pashto worked, and often, it was easier to do that in relation to Dari (when English is their third or fourth language, sometimes it’s easier to use Dari to ask your professor if the attempt at past progressive you just made in Pashto was correct). Because of this learning of Pashto through both English and Dari, I wasn’t only finding the hidden meanings in Dari or Pashto words anymore, I was replacing entire concepts with them. It seemed that Sapir, or Whorf, or both, had been on to something. How I was thinking was changing.

Over the next few months, I spent hours a day talking with our professors. … We did all this talking in part to prepare for the final test, but mostly because speaking a language that you’re learning is by far the hardest thing to do with it; it’s much easier to recognize words than it is to pull them whole cloth from your memory. Speaking, putting those words and ideas into (hopefully) the same order as native speakers do, is by far the best way to strengthen your language skills. Taylor and I were both “good” at Pashto, but we had a problem; we couldn’t help but speak Dari.

We figured, given the no/minimal English rules, we should just use Dari whenever we didn’t know a Pashto word. The result was strange sentences that would be 60 to 70 percent Dari nouns and adjectives, with Pashto pronouns and verbs. Or, instead of asking “to drink څنګه وایئ” (“how do you say” in Pashto plus “to drink” in English) like our classmates, we would inevitably say say “څنګه وایئ نوشیدن” (“how do you say” in Pashto and “to drink” in Dari). The first time we did this with Rahimi he just paused, looked at us both, and said “I understand what you’re doing. But I hate this.” Us being us, this of course then meant that we kept doing it.

In part because it was fun, his faux exasperation a nice game we could play together, but mostly because we didn’t really understand how he could dislike this so much, we kept mixing and matching the two languages. We figured it was super-cool, ’cause like, how many other students could do that? We also figured that while Rahimi’s English was great, wasn’t his Dari better? Pashtun he may have been, but as far as we knew he was equally fluent in both. But when we finally got around to asking him about it, it turned out that it was harder for him to convert the Dari to Pashto, or vice versa, because he never thought that way. He was perfectly fluent in Dari—the man had been an interpreter all over Afghanistan—but it wasn’t one of the two languages he primarily thought in these days, nor did he ever combine it with Pashto. Mixing Pashto and English was common for him; that’s what he did all day at work. But if he thought in Pashto, Pashto it was. And if he thought in Dari, same. What we were doing was some weird bastardization of the two that did not sit well with him.

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by | 26 February 2025 · 7:07 am

From Dari at DLI to AFSOC

From What the Taliban Told Me, by Ian Fritz (Simon & Schuster, 2023), Kindle pp. 49-52:

At the end of my year at DLI, I could debate the merits of divorce and its effects on children in Dari, discuss politics, and attempt to answer the question “What is love?” (This was the last question I was asked in my speaking exam. I would like to think my inability to answer was more due to my being twenty than my lack of language skill.) I could tell jokes, explain the meanings of proverbs, and generally shoot the shit with most any Dari-speaking Afghan. I thought in Dari, dreamt in Dari, and often found it easier to express myself in it. This is true for lots of recently graduated linguists; when we met a newly minted Arabic linguist at survival school and asked him what DLI and learning a language so fast was like, he said it’s cool, but it can mess with your thinking a little bit. A couple days later he was telling some story, when he stopped halfway through a sentence, with a dazed look on his face. “Wait, shit. What’s the word for that thing you eat cereal with?” “A spoon?” “Yeah, that’s it, a fucking spoon. Fucking Arabic.”

Like any skill, language can atrophy. After I left DLI, and went to Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, for cryptology school, I wasn’t expected to speak Dari seven hours a day and I didn’t. While we were there, my friends and I still used our Dari, the whole secret language thing feeling like a superpower on occasion, but it wasn’t quite the same and so I forgot some words and a few complicated grammatical structures. But after Goodfellow, I wasn’t spending time with a group of other Dari linguists. Everyone else in our class had been assigned to Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, to fly on the Rivet Joint, or RJ, a billion-dollar spy plane with a half dozen plus linguists listening to multiple languages flying on it during any given mission. Back then, if you enlisted as an airborne linguist, this was essentially what you signed up to do; new linguists could only get assigned to Offutt, or so we were told. But something had changed, so I, and just one other student, Taylor, had been assigned to Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) at Hurlburt Field, Florida (affectionately known as Hurby, Hurlburt being annoying to say). This meant that we had to travel separately from our friends, as we had to get different training than them.

Taylor and I did not like each other when we were at DLI. We were both arrogant, confident that we were better at learning languages than our classmates. This confidence was encouraged by our teachers, who weren’t paid to teach us how to be good humans, just good linguists. But Taylor’s surety had never really been challenged; I doubt anyone had ever told him that he was “the most insecure narcissist I’ve ever met” (this was said to me by my best friend’s mother when I was in high school). If anything, someone had probably told him he was the most secure narcissist they ever met, and he had said “Thank you!” with a gleam in his eye and some Cheshire cat in his grin….

He didn’t even need to enlist, as he’d secured all the letters he needed to attend the Air Force Academy. He had just decided that he didn’t want to deal with all the bullshit that goes on there.

When we got assigned to Special Operations, told that we were going to become DSOs, the most elite of airborne cryptologic linguists, Taylor fell for the mythology (a mythology that he knew virtually nothing about) hook, line, and sinker. He managed to keep it to himself when we were at Goodfellow with our RJ-bound classmates, but once he and I went our separate way, on to parachute training before heading back to survival school for Advanced Beatings class, he would tell anyone who would listen what badasses we were, or at least had been chosen to become.

When he would tell some other random airman, “Yeah, we know three languages—Farsi, Dari, and Tajik,” I’d supplement this—not complete untruth, but not total truth—with “Well, they’re really the same language, but with different accents.”

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by | 7 April 2023 · 5:51 am

Soviet Campaign for Latin Scripts

From Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, by Jing Tsu (Riverhead Books, 2022), Kindle pp. 188-192:

In 1921, twenty-two-year-old Qu Qiubai was dispatched by a Chinese news syndicate from Beijing to the Soviet Union with a mission to report on the post-Bolshevik regime. The journey would become a personal quest as well as a political pilgrimage for this rookie journalist with delicate features and a touch of melancholy. Qu unexpectedly met many compatriots on his way to Moscow, among them Chinese laborers and shopkeepers ensconced in the Far East cities of Irkutsk and Chita.

…

Qu was sent back to Russia in 1928 with many of his fellow Chinese Marxists to regroup under the tutelage of their Bolshevik brothers. By this time, the language question occupied the forefront of the Soviet Union’s policy toward its own national minorities. The newly unified Soviet Union included swaths of Central Asia that did not speak or read Russian. Among the groups in these regions that already had a written tradition, Arabic had been in use for almost a thousand years. Some of the national minorities in Turkic Central Asia had no script at all. Pacifying and assimilating these groups would require careful strategy from the Soviets. Reducing illiteracy with Latinized scripts became a key part of a general campaign to educate and control the population.

After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Central Asia Turkic republics began testing the Latin alphabet as a medium for their spoken languages. Many Turkic groups saw Arabic script as increasingly insufficient to meet the practical demands of modern life, much in the same way that Chinese reformers had viewed character writing as a disadvantage in the technological age. As a Soviet Tajik poet explained, the Latin alphabet flew at the speed of an airplane, while the Arabic script limped along like a weak donkey in pain. Others saw the conversion to Latin script as a matter of sharing in humanity’s survival, because written records provide continuity from the past into the present.

The Soviet Central Committee supported the Latinization of the Arabic script in pursuit of a multinational language policy. The idea was to give each group its own right to linguistic self-determination within the newly unified Soviet state. Fifty-two languages were targeted for conversion to Roman script and about seventy were eventually Latinized, spanning an area that stretched between Norway and Korea.

In truth, Latinization was also a way to divide and conquer. From the Russians’ perspective, Central Asia was about as savage and backward as a place could be—and they found its inhabitants difficult to tell apart. The Azerbaijanis were often referred to as the Tatars, Uzbeks as the Sarts, and Tajiks as the Uzbeks. If the Soviet East were to be brought to heel, the Russians thought, it would have to be purged of its Islamic influence. It was convenient to seize on the Arabic script as an object of backwardness in need of reform. And as long as the Turkic republics had their own separate writing systems—in Latin script, not the Turko-Persian Arabic that a few groups were already accustomed to—it would be harder for them to form a pan-Islamic alliance that could challenge Soviet rule. Only later, in the late 1930s, would language policy shift from Latinization to Cyrillization. Once these groups were sufficiently distant from their mother tongues, Russian control and influence could strengthen.

The Soviets were eager to include the Chinese laborers of the Amur region as a test group in their anti-illiteracy Latinization campaigns, hoping to extend their influence even further into Asia. These were the Chinese laborers whom Qu had met during his first trip to the Soviet Union. Their illiteracy rate was almost 100 percent.

The Soviet campaigns were instructive for the Chinese Communists, at the time young political upstarts. During his time in China serving the CCP, Qu had been immersed in Chinese language debates and consequently had a more informed perspective on language reforms when he returned to the Soviet Union. Yet Qu was not a trained linguist. He solicited the help of the Russian linguists Vsevolod S. Kolokolov and Aleksandr A. Dragunov. He drafted a proposal for the Latin New Script in February 1929 and distributed two hundred copies among Chinese workers. A revised version, with further input from Kolokolov, was published that October and reprinted again the year after with three thousand additional copies in distribution.

The Chinese laborers cheered the effort. Night schools opened to teach them how to recognize simple phrases like “boiled water” or “I sell dumplings,” as well as ideological questions like “To what class do poor people belong?” More than five thousand factory workers and peasants were able to read and write letters to their families by the time they graduated, thanks to the comrades who volunteered their time as instructors and administrators. Between 1931 and 1936, scores of Latin New Script textbooks and several literary works were circulated and taught. The demand was overwhelming. The language reformers could not train teachers or print textbooks fast enough. A weekly newspaper wholly printed in Latin New Script, Yngxu Sin Wenz (Support the New Alphabet), was published in Khabarovsk, with its forty-third issue appearing in late 1934.

Instruction in Latin New Script was touted as a hallmark event in an era of socialist brotherhood and mutual aid. The Soviets saw it as an opportunity to finally address the problem of illiteracy among the community of one hundred thousand Chinese laborers within their territory. As for the Chinese Marxists, they now had a linguistic instrument with which to reach their revolutionary goals: If the Chinese could read easily, they could be radicalized and converted to communism with the new script. For Qu, it was inevitable, even imperative, that Latinization would replace written characters. Unlike National Romanization, which was designed by a small coterie of academically minded intellectuals and based on fancy linguistic theories, he remarked, Latin New Script was a practical phonetic script that served every dialect and every class.

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by | 2 December 2022 · 5:46 am

Second Annexation of Crimea

From Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea, by Jens Mühling (Armchair Traveller series; Haus, 2022), Kindle pp. 12-14:

I have a very clear memory of the moment the Black Sea suddenly moved from the margins to the forefront of European perception.

I was on a pleasure cruise around Sevastopol’s harbour in March 2014. Less than a fortnight earlier, Russian soldiers had appeared in Crimea and surrounded Ukrainian barracks. Although their uniforms bore no insignia or rank, no one had any doubts about where they came from. Parliament had been dissolved and replaced with puppets under the Kremlin’s orders, a hastily arranged referendum on Crimea’s integration into the Russian Federation had been announced for the next day, and Ukrainian and Russian warships were facing off in the harbour – and yet tour boats continued to ply their trade between the destroyers as if everything were completely normal.

I had travelled to Sevastopol as a journalist to report on the act of political piracy that was taking place. I had no idea at the time that in 1773, not far from that same harbour, on the south-western coast of Crimea, Jan Hendrik van Kinsbergen had laid the groundwork for Catherine the Great’s annexation of the peninsula. All I knew was that I was witnessing Russia’s second annexation of Crimea.

The tour boat passed close to the warships’ towering grey hulls. The Ukrainian and Russian Black Sea fleets still shared the port in that tense time before the Crimean referendum, and I had hoped that out on the water I might gain a better understanding of their muddled positions. The boat was full of Russians from Sevastopol, high on alcohol and patriotism, who made no secret of the fact that they wished a plague on the Ukrainians.

‘Fascists!’ they roared at the ships flying blue-and-yellow flags. For weeks now, Russian propaganda had constantly dubbed all Ukrainians fascists. The same old story, I thought. A country on the warpath in search of some barbarians to fight. One man stood slightly apart from the others by the railing, staring silently out to sea. He was the only person apart from me who didn’t join in with the shouting. As we disembarked at the end of our tour, I approached him to enquire why he was there.

‘To say goodbye to the sea,’ he said tersely.

He was a Tatar. He had been born in Uzbekistan after his parents were deported under Stalin, and only when the Soviet Union collapsed, and Crimea and the rest of Ukraine gained its independence, had he been at liberty to return to the land of his ancestors.

‘Now the Russians are taking over again,’ he said gloomily. ‘I’m not going to wait for them to expel us a second time. My wife has family in Ankara. The day after tomorrow, we’re going to put the kids in the car and leave.’ His lips twisted into a bitter smile. ‘It won’t be the first time we’ve had to start from scratch.’

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