Pratap Chatterjee

BASIR "Steve" Ahmed was returning from a bomb-clearing mission in Khogyani district in northeastern Afghanistan when a suicide bomber blew up an explosive-filled vehicle nearby. The blast flipped the military armoured truck Ahmed was riding in three or four times, and filled it with smoke. The Afghan translator had been accompanying the 927th Engineer Company near the Pakistan border on that October day in 2008 that would forever change his life.

"I saw the gunner come out and I followed him. The U.S. Army soldiers helped pull me out, but I got burns," says Ahmed, who had worked as a contract translator with U.S. troops for almost four years. "The last thing I remember was the ‘dub-dub-dub’ of a Chinook helicopter." A medical evacuation team took the injured men to a U.S. Army hospital at Bagram Base.

Three days later Ahmed regained consciousness, but was suffering from shrapnel wounds in his scalp and severe burns covering his right hand and leg.

A little more than three months after his accident, Ahmed was fired by his employer, Mission Essential Personnel (MEP) of Columbus, Ohio - the largest supplier of translators to the U.S. military in Afghanistan. In a statement released to this reporter, the company said that Ahmed’s "military point of contact (POC) informed MEP that Basir was frequently late and did not show up on several occasions. A few days later, Basir’s POC called MEP’s manager and told her that they were not able to use him and requested a new linguist."

Ahmed says he missed only one day of work and arrived late twice.

Today, he lives in hiding in nearby Jalalabad for fear that his family will be targeted because he had worked with the U.S. military. The 29-year-old has no job and had to wait nine months for disability compensation to pay for medical treatment for the burns that still prevent him from lifting his hand to his mouth to feed himself.

Ahmed is one of dozens of local Afghans who have been abandoned or poorly treated by a complex web of U.S. contractors, their insurance companies, and their military counterparts despite years of service risking life and limb to help the U.S. military in the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

"I Trust Him With My Life"

On a table inside a safe house in Kabul, Basir Ahmed placed dozens of photos, certificates of appreciation, and letters of recommendation from the U.S. military units he had worked with between 2005 and 2009. Some pictures showed him in Nuristan wearing T-shirts and wraparound sunglasses and sitting next to the sandbags and concrete barriers. In others, he stood in camouflage gear in the depths of winter next to a snowman.

For example, Sergeant David R. Head and First Lieutenant Candace N. Mathis of the Provincial Reconstruction Team at Task Force Spartan at the Kamdesh base wrote on Dec. 22, 2006 that: "his performance was superb and very professional. He works well as a linguist, and is always punctual."

On May 11, 2008, Ahmed received a certificate of appreciation from Lieutenant Colonel Anthony O. Wright of the 70th Engineer Battalion (Kodiaks) for his help as an interpreter during the road-clearing programme from 2006 to 2008.

It was just five months later, on a similar patrol with the 927th Engineer Company, that Ahmed was injured. At the Bagram Base, the military doctors did some skin grafts, but after about 11 days, sent him to an Afghan military hospital in Kabul. For two to three months he could not sleep properly - scaring his family when he woke up yelling.

Then Gabby Nelson - the MEP site manager - summoned Ahmed back to Jalalabad, where she had the military doctors look at him again. For about 15 days, they treated the burns. He had to report to the gate of the base at 7 a.m. in the middle of winter for Nelson to drive him to the hospital one kilometer away - too far to walk with his injuries. She was often an hour late, he said, a painful and cold delay, but when he asked her to be more punctual, she said she would stop picking him up. He stopped going to the hospital.

Two weeks later Ahmed says Nelson asked him to report for a 12-hour shift starting at 6 a.m. despite the doctors’ recommendation for a month’s rest. After working for the full month, he received 578 dollars, significantly less than the 845 dollars that he normally earned.

Then as luck would have it, he says, he missed work once and was late twice, because of delays on the road to the base, where the Afghan and U.S. forces often tied up traffic with their manoeuvres, he explained. Nelson told him to turn in his badge. He tried to appeal to the military, but they said they couldn’t help him - so he left the base on Jan. 24, 2009.

Soldiers, who had previously worked with Ahmed, confirmed the certificates of appreciation and recommendations about his punctuality and the quality of his work. "He did his job diligently and willingly. He served with us during the most uncomfortable times, but never complained," said one soldier, who asked to remain anonymous.

Official Response

Ahmed’s employer - Ohio-based Mission Essential Personnel - was awarded a five-year contract in September 2007 by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). The contract, to provide 1,691 translators in Afghanistan, is worth up to 414 million dollars.

MEP spokesman Sean Rushton says that the company did the best it could to help Ahmed with his medical needs. "A desire to improve treatment of linguists is what began our company," said the spokesman.

Rushton and MEP’s senior management said that they were pained to hear that Basir was upset at being "let go."

"Anyone reading an account of a translator who was simply let go by a company after being wounded would of course be outraged at the company, but that not only isn’t true in this instance, exactly the opposite is the case," the company said in a statement released to the media.

"We have financial records showing seven disability and salary payments between his injury and the final settlement. It has been said Basir [Ahmed] received insufficient medical care, yet MEP employees not only ensured his medical coverage, they regularly took him to his treatment and got him into a U.S. military hospital," the company stated.

"It has been suggested Basir waited endlessly for his disability settlement, yet the funds arrived within six weeks of his rehabilitation’s conclusion. It has been suggested MEP forced Basir to return to work when he was still recuperating, yet MEP had no financial incentive to do so and in fact, at Basir’s request, MEP got him onto accommodated duty, free of physical hardship. It has been suggested MEP cut Basir loose after he was dismissed by his military supervisor, yet MEP was and is anxious to help Basir, including by considering him for a new job."

Reached by phone for his response to MEP’s statement, Ahmed says that he did get disability payments such as a check for 10,000 dollars sent to him in early July 2009 - nine months after he was injured. Yet he still feels that his employer and the military abandoned him.

But he has not been completely forgotten. About two months after leaving his job, he started receiving death threats. "Believe me, my family is too scared. One day I saw a night letter from the Taliban. They put it in our door: ‘You three brothers work for the U.S. Army. Quit your job. Otherwise we are going to kill your whole family,’" he says.

Like many of his colleagues, Ahmed had kept his employment a secret from his neighbours; he believes that the injuries provided a clue about the true nature of his occupation to Taliban sympathizers in the community.

[This is the first of a two-part investigative series on translators in Afghanistan by Pratap Chatterjee. Courtesy IPS]

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How to apologise without saying sorry

Chaitanya Kalbag

APOLOGISING is never easy.  Barack Obama knows this now.  He made a non-apology apology last week to a Massachusetts police sergeant two days after saying the officer “acted stupidly” in arresting Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr because he was trying to break into his own house.   

Obama’s decision to wade into a local issue involving an African-American friend triggered a worldwide debate on race and the U.S. criminal justice system.   The Cambridge Police Department dropped a charge of disorderly conduct against Gates and said  the incident was “regrettable and unfortunate”, but demanded that Obama himself apologise and in an unusually direct rebuke said the president had used the right words but at the wrong party. 

It was ironic that Gates should be involved in a racial row.  When football star O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the charge of killing his estranged wife Nicole and her friend in 1995, Gates published a brilliant and critical analysis, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man” in The New Yorker.  “Many blacks as well as whites saw the trial’s outcome as a grim enactment of Richard Pryor’s comic rejoinder ‘Who are you going to believe — me, or your lying eyes?’” Gates wrote. 

Not forgetting that Rupert Murdoch had to apologise to the victims’ families for planning to publish O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It.   

But Obama, who shot into national consciousness with his carefully choreographed “colourless” campaign and was hailed as ushering in a new, post-racial United States, had to interrupt a White House press briefing on Friday to offer the kind of mea culpa that his wordmeisters must have sweated bucketfuls over.  Obama said he could have “calibrated those words differently”.  Then he said: 

“My sense is you've got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in the way that it should have been resolved and the way they would have liked it to be resolved.” 

It sounded like Obama had studied the same primer as Rita Bahuguna Joshi, who said after sledging Mayawati: “"I regret what I said in a fit of anger. If it is being misconstrued, if it's being misinterpreted, it is being taken out of context, then I regret it.”  

Apparently Obama decided to “apologise” to Sergeant Jim Crowley after talking the matter over with his wife Michelle.  The president has quite a few other things to mull over.  His honeymoon is definitely over.  A Zogby poll last week put Obama’s approval rating at 48%; 51% of those polled felt the U.S. was “on the wrong track”.  This, pollster John Zogby noted, was about where George W. Bush was with voters just before the 9/11 attacks. A CBS News Poll put Obama’s approval rating at 57% -- down from 68% in April.  The good news is that another CBS poll said more blacks in the U.S. – 59% felt that race relations have improved, up sharply from 29% in July 2008.  The bad news is that 43% of blacks believe they are stopped by police because of their race.  DBW – Driving While Black – is not a nice place to be, even if you are driving an expensive BMW.  

So on a range of issues – healthcare reform, the way the huge stimulus package is being spent, the backtracking on Guantanamo, the growing “surge” in Afghanistan – Obama is not coming through as a blazing reformer with a flaming sword.   

Actually he is having a fairly easy time of apologising.  His predecessor spent his first few months in the White House feeling regretful. 

Very early in his first term, Bush had to apologise personally to the Japanese prime minister after a U.S. nuclear submarine smashed into a Japanese fishing vessel carrying schoolchildren off Hawaii, killing nine of them. 

A few weeks later, a U.S spy plane with 24 crew members force-landed on China’s Hainan island after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet.  The Americans sent a repatriation team to bring back the crew after an 11-day standoff, and said they were “very sorry” that the Chinese pilot had died in the collision. 

You would think that after Vietnam, Cambodia and Watergate,  Americans had had a lot of practice in deniability.  Ten years ago NATO planes bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.  China’s People’s Daily commented scornfully this May that the incident had been shrugged off by the U.S. as a “mistaken bombing”.  “Taking into account that this event is a page already turned in history, the alertness and latent hostility that the U.S. holds towards China seems not to have vanished.” 

Six years into its occupation of Iraq, we are only just beginning to hear a little less about the collateral damage of teenaged U.S. soldiers shooting dead civilians who did not slow down near checkpoints.  We don’t hear apologies either about the civilian deaths caused along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border by unmanned drone bombings.  The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said in April that 546,000 people have registered as refugees, forced to flee their homes by the relentless bombing.  

Back to the art of apology.  The Japanese used to have it down pat.  Their language is peppered with apologetic phrases.  Every time somebody brushed against me in an impossibly crowded Tokyo subway train both of us would mutter gomen nasai – forgive me.   And Indians did not invent anticipatory bail – the Japanese routinely say shitsurei shimasu, “excuse me for what I am about to do”.  But the coinage has got a little debased recently. 

Much was made last year when Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony, did not apologise personally for a series of mishaps in which Sony’s lithium-ion batteries caused laptops to burst into flames.  Observers noted that a lower-ranking Sony official bowed from a sitting position while apologising for the overheating batteries, of which Sony eventually had to recall 9.6 million. 

In contrast, Citigroup’s former CEO Chuck Prince, apologising for problems that led to the closure of the banking giant’s Japanese private banking licence, stood up and bowed for a full seven seconds.  Leslie Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist for Weber Shandwick, writes in Corporate Reputation: 12 Steps to Safeguarding and Recovering Reputation that CEOs need to follow three important steps when apologising: take responsibility, act quickly, and communicate sincerity.  apan’s Prime Minister Taro Aso was tearful last week when he announced early elections and the dissolution of the Lower House. "My wavering remarks caused anxiety and distrust in the public and led to a fall in the party support rate," Aso was quoted by Kyodo as saying at the start of his speech. "I'm deeply repentant."

Apparently Aso had planned to apologise in the middle of his speech but his Chief Cabinet Secretary advised him to start off with an apology. In May, Ichiro Ozawa resigned in tears as president of the main opposition party over a political funding scandal.

Maybe Obama’s wordsmiths need to get together with Manmohan Singh’s to craft a non-apology apology for the Sharm el-Sheikh joint statement. Or maybe our diplomats and ministers just need to tear up a bit.

[The writer is former editor in chief of the Hindustan Times and former Asia head of Reuters]

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India should listen to Parchanda’s advice

Dr Sawraj Singh

DURING a recent visit to England, Parchanda, the Maoist leader and the former Prime Minister of Nepal, tried to give some sincere advice to India.  He said that America was trying to increase its influence in Asia and India should join China to stop America from expanding its influence there.  He also said that he did not want to tilt Nepal to China but wanted to maintain equal relations with India and China.  Parchanda has also claimed that he did not allow America and India to use Nepal against China and that cost him his job.

Some of India’s senior military officers have also cautioned India against getting involved in a war with China.  They feel that India cannot match China’s strength.  India should seriously reconsider its policy toward America and China.

It is no hidden secret that America wants to use India to contain China.  This policy was made during Bush’s presidency.  President Obama wants to change the American policies toward China, the Islamic countries and the third World countries. However he is finding out that it is very difficult to bring any fundamental change in the American policies.  His healthcare reform is facing very serious resistance.  At first, there were shouting zealots who did not want to listen to the others and will not allow them to speak.  Now there are people carrying hand guns and even assault rifles to express their opposition to the President            .

The worst fear is that if there is violence against the President that can easily change into a racial confrontation in an America which is already getting polarized along the racial lines. Many people had hoped that a black President would lead to more unity between different races and make diversity and multiculturalism more acceptable, exactly the opposite seems to be happening.

It seems that Obama may not be able to change the jingoist anti China, anti Islam and anti third World policies started by Bush.  A recent trailer was seen when the Bolywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan was subjected to 2 hours security search at the New York airport because he is a Muslim.  Does India want to be seen aligned with anti third World policies when India itself belongs to the third World?  This also means that such American policies can only increase tensions and instability in the South Asia region. India has most to lose if this region becomes unstable.

The out come of Iraq war and now the direction of war in Afghanistan should convince India that the American policies in the region are not going to succeed.  In Afghanistan, the Taliban are gaining control over most of the country, even Kabul is no longer safe.  President Karzai is aligning with the war lords such as Dostum.  These war lords have frequently switched sides.  For example, Dostum has changed sides so many times that it is even difficult to keep a count of which side he was on.  Therefore, Karzai’s alliance with Dostum shows his utter desperation.  Karzai belongs to the dominant Pashtun clan while Dostum is on Uzbek. Kazai’s alliance with Dostum can further lower his standing among the Pashtuns and can only help the Taliban to further increase their influence among the Pashtuns.  Traditionally, Pashtuns have always dominated Afghanistan.  It is becoming increasingly clear that America’s fate in Afghanistan is going to be similar to its fate in Iraq and will be like the British in nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century.

India should finally accept the fact that the American influence is declining while China’s influence is growing.  Many people in the world feel that America can no longer maintain its only superpower status.  Even the present recession should have convinced India that the West is declining and the east is rising.  How long India wants to deny the obvious.  Time has come for India to seriously reconsider its policies and start asserting itself as a part of the third World and the East.

[The writer is a doctor by profession and is Chairman Washington State Network for Human Rights]

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