Last Nov. 14, I went to Washington for a meeting of the National Security Education Board as one of 11 directors. The board administers the National Security Education Program.

Most of the other directors represent government defense and intelligence agencies and the Department of State. But there are also professors and administrators from colleges and universities, including Richard Brecht, director of the National Foreign Languages Center at the University of Maryland.

The National Security Education Program provides grants to graduate and undergraduate students to study the cultures and languages of certain foreign countries, especially those that are less typically taught in America. In return, the students agree to serve for several years in the national-security field, in academia or government.

One of the items on the agenda at the board’s November meeting shook some of us up. A serious national-security risk is Americans’ inability to speak the languages of countries where our security is involved, and especially where our military fights. That day we received a list of 10 languages newly deemed critical to our security by defense, intelligence and other government agencies.

They were Arabic, Chinese, Dari/Pashto (Afghanistan), Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Persian/Farsi, Russian, Turkish and Urdu (Pakistan). Very few Americans can speak these tongues.

If you’ve read the best-seller “Bush at War,” by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, you know that the United States had trouble in Afghanistan because we lacked people on the ground who could speak Dari. We had to rely on Afghans – who took the CIA’s money but did not lead us to Osama bin Laden.

Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance took our money but would not move south against the Taliban. The CIA then dropped in an old-time agent who spoke fluent Dari. He talked to the Northern Alliance, then directed American planes to start precision bombing on nearby Taliban front lines – and the Northern Alliance began to move south at a fairly rapid pace.

The Taliban were soon finished off.

But in the bombing of Tora-Bora, we did not kill or capture Osama bin Laden, because our military forces couldn’t talk to the people who lived around the caves. These were people had seen bin Laden on horseback and probably knew just where he was at any given time.

The inability of our forces to speak with the natives was apparently a major reason why we did not commit many troops to Afghanistan – and may be why bin Laden escaped.

If the Americans had been able to talk to the natives who were talking to al-Qaida, they might have learned the whereabouts of bin Laden.

When the United States moves into Iraq, we might well have the same problem. Again, we simply don’t have enough people in our military who can speak the native languages, Arabic and Kurdish.

So despite having the world’s best-trained airborne infantry, we face a huge handicap: Our troops will deftly parachute into an area, but once they hit the ground they won’t be able to ask directions of the local people – or adjust the information they received in their mission briefing.

Our board’s discussion in November made clear that the United States is the only country in the world that waits to seriously teach foreign languages until college or even later. Yet the best time to learn foreign languages is childhood; youngsters learn languages faster and more throughly than adults, including the proper accent. Many older students learn a language but cannot master the accent.

Americans’ resistance to teaching foreign languages in elementary school is not unrelated to the almost vehement drive to eliminate bilingual education from the schools. Few other countries have such high percentages of foreigners in their populations, yet we seem to be pushing all children to speak only English. The argument is: This is America, so everyone should just speak English.

The drive to eliminate bilingual education started in California and is now in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Most of the children who speak a foreign language in this country are from immigrant families, and many are poor.

Why can’t we have an education system that teaches both English to immigrant children and other languages to native children? And not just other Western European languages, but such increasingly important tongues as Arabic, Dari, Urdu and Korean?

Clinton’s secretary of education, Richard Riley, pushed for a system of duel-language schools, to be paid for with federal funds, but he couldn’t get it through Congress. He said that 54 percent of all teachers in America have some students with limited English proficiency, yet only 20 percent of the teachers feel prepared to serve these youngsters. One wonders what becomes of these children; do they have a chance to escape poverty in adulthood?

But more broadly, said Riley, “proficiency in English and one other language is something that we need to encourage among all young people. … They are the wave of the future.”

In any event, last July the National Security Education Program initiated, on a pilot basis, the college teaching of Arabic, Korean and Mandarin: Competitive-bid grants went to Brigham Young University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Hawaii and the University of Washington. So next fall a few students will enroll in these courses. Implementation of this program would cost $8 million year; implementation of a program teaching all 10 of the languages now deemed critical for national security would cost up to $15 million a year. This is a relatively small start, but an urgently needed one.

It is absurd that a nation as large and rich as the United States, made up of so many peoples from around the world, can’t do a better job teaching languages – so that all its citizens speak at least English and one foreign tongue.

Were we to achieve this, we would fight poverty at home and boost our national security abroad.

Bruce Sundlun teaches at the University of Rhode Island. A lawyer and business executive, he was governor of Rhode Island in 1991-95.