THIS WASHINGTON POST COLUMN ON THE NSA is right to point up the shortage of linguists: “Last September, the number of linguists fluent in the primary languages of Afghanistan — Pashto and Dari — could be counted on one hand with fingers left over, a senior intelligence official told me. The problem is not new: When U.S. troops went into Haiti in 1994, for example, the NSA had only one Haitian Creole linguist.”

On the other hand, this suggestion is a bit late: “One way to lessen the chance of future attack by al Qaeda or similar groups would be to create a sort of national linguistic reserve force along the lines of the military reserve.” Actually, the U.S. government has been paying people to learn obscure foreign languages for years, via a scholarship program aimed at addressing precisely this problem. People aren’t subject to call-up, as in the military, but I’m sure that the agencies could have (and probably did) call on some of these people in the aftermath of 9/11.

The real problem with communications intelligence is that you have to know what and who you’re listening for. If your other intelligence isn’t up to that, you have to throw out a dragnet that’s likely to draw in irrelevancies while missing the important stuff.