Uyghur, Turkomen, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Azerbaijani....they should be just as critical languages as Arabic and Russian. They’re Turkic languages (minus Tajik) related to Turkish. Any Muslim-majority country is a potential breeding ground for terrorism, and the government needs people who speak those languages.
Indiana University has a Central Asian languages department for many of these languages and also Pashtu. As far as I know, only they have shown such foresight.
I knew a bunch of guys in the Air Force in the early 60s. Like most of us, they joined up to take to the skies and defeat the Soviet Bear. Imagine the shock of some of those guys who, upon completion of Basic Training, received their orders to Indiana University to study Albanian. Which 18-year old kid even knew Albania existed? One guy dropped out of Berkeley because he was sick of academia. He got orders to go back to Berkeley to take a year of Chinese.