If he truly wants to be president of all 57 states, he’s going to have to brush up on his knowledge of the Middle East. Here’s what he said at a stop in Cape Girardeau, Missouri yesterday. He was talking about the need for more Arabic speakers in Afghanistan.

“If they are all in Iraq, then its harder for us to use them in Afghanistan.”

The only problem with that logic is that Afghanis don’t speak Arabic. To quote Encyclopedia Britannica:

Pashto and Persian (Dari), both Indo-European languages, are the official languages of the country. More than two-fifths of the population speak Pashto, the language of the Pashtuns, while about half speak some dialect of Persian. While the Afghan dialect of Persian is generally termed “Dari,” a number of dialects are spoken among the Tajik, ?az?ra, Chahar Aimak, and Kizilbash peoples, including dialects that are more closely akin to the Persian spoken in Iran (Farsi) or the Persian spoken in Tajikistan (Tajik).

Obama advisers are trying to spin this as him actually being accurate, but ABC News’ David Wright does an excellent job putting away their arguments.

As for the point about Arabic translators needed for Afghanistan, the Obama campaign points to the well-documented presence of foreign fighters there, many of whom do speak Arabic. However, these folks are mostly shooting at NATO troops, not talking to them.

No doubt there are a handful of Arabic speakers employed at Bagram and Kandahar and other detention centers to interrogate foreign fighters captured on the battlefield. But I have not seen any reports that there is a shortage of such personnel, or that the need for such translators in Iraq has hamstrung the interrogators in Afghanistan.

As Wright notes, foreign fighters in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been sent to detention centers such as Guantanamo. If there is a shortage of translators there, we’ve yet to see news reports about it.