NBC Reporter Richard Engel's Clear-Eyed Look at Afghanistan

It's some of talented NBC Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel's best reporting yet, and it couldn't have come at a more timely moment.

Engel's documentary airing Sunday night at 8 on MSNBC, Richard Engel: Tip of The Spear, comes on the eighth anniversary of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. It greatly expands on his Emmy-winning "NBC Nightly News" series on that embattled country, much in the news these days as President Obama ponders U.S. military strategy there.

Engel, a top-notch reporter who speaks Arabic (!) and who carries no political baggage around the Middle East, made his seventh appearance on Charlie Rose's PBS interview show this week to promote Sunday's doc, and it was one of the more worthwhile and newsworthy interviews Rose has done lately. Engel, who's spent months with an American infantry unit in a remote Afghan valley, gave his clear-headed, up-close version of what's been going on in that far-away embattled land. Some of his more interesting answers (from my notes, and at some points I paraphrase):

• Engel's description of Kabul today:

  It's a weird place. You'll be sitting in a hotel lobby, and some guy walks in dressed in white carrying a tennis racket. Restaurants and taxis are all operating. It looks like a normal city, with a lot of expats in the hotels. But 20 miles away, in the villages, there are firefights and bombing going on.

• Engel on how the Afghans look at Americans in their country:

  "They don't really hate us. They just look at us oddly and say, 'Are you still here? Why? Very little has changed in eight years," the youthful Engel, who was previously stationed in Iraq for ABC News, told Rose.

• Rose asked Engel about the distinction increasingly heard about the difference between the Taliban and Al Qaida. Engel shrugged:

  There really isn't that much of a difference any more. I had a Taliban commander tell me exactly that recently. They both have the same goals.

• Rose asked if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't largely the same. Engel:

  Not at all. In Iraq, you had a civil war, Sunnis killing Shiites, and vice-versa. You'd have Iraqis run up to American soldiers and beg them to restore some stability. It's not the same thing in Afghanistan at all. We're just the latest occupiers to them.

  Engel also said the Pakistan government and army hasn't gotten enough credit for their push back against the Taliban and Al Qaida lately, though he added, "I'm not sure it will do much good."

• How do the Afghans regard the Taliban? Rose asked.

  Nobody wants the Taliban to come back, but neither do they want a bunch of foreigners telling them how to run their government.

  Engel showed Rose a few clips of Sunday night's show, with Viper Company engaged in a fierce firefight with Taliban soldiers - a daily occurrence, Engel said. "Our troops have gotten a lot better at this kind of fighting," said Engel. "But so have the Taliban."

• Should we get out of Afghanistan? Rose asked the intrepid NBC reporter.

  Yes, replied Engel, but it's not going to be easy - or quick.

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Comments

[S1m0n]

Afghanistan isn't an arabic-speaking nation. Yes, it's exciting to discover that an American journalist speaks a second language, but doing so will be of limited use on his present assignment.

[raker]

I saw a small clip of this program on the NBC Nightly News the other night. Engel said some fatuous thing about "supporting the troops" that made me not want to hear another word.

[Strywever]

Since he's often embedded with the troops, is intimately familiar with the challenges they face every day, and says he counts as friends many current and former soldiers who are serving or have served in the Middle East and corresponds with them regularly, I suspect his comment about supporting the troops was more heartfelt than you realize.

[Greg0658]

Your Shock n Awe video presentation tomorrow .. I am wondering if you will have any new
facts for us to digest.

The 3 Afghanistan presentations currently being floated .. 0 troops added .. 40K troops added .. 60K troops added.

I have not heard any of the MSM tell me where these troops will come from .. Iraq .. Korea .. Germany .. SE Asia .. another internal USA National Guardsmen deployment or Active Duty
deployment or a DRAFT.

I asked once .. was told troop levels and deployed from statistics are on a need to know basis. I was wondering if at least once a year .. say at USA Fiscal Budget time .. that troop deployments by Service, State, Regular Enlistment & National Guard could be put forth for us to ponder. Other useful facts .. deaths, injuries, suicides, divorces, bankruptcies, # of stop losses, # of deployments, # of stateside job losses for Guardsmen (not able to retain job for some legal/illegal reason), # that give satisfactory rating of post service VA benefits.

Not that anything that you all say in the MSM matters much .. because all we get to set as far as policy is elect the characters in the play come November 2010 and again in 2012 ... because inquiring minds want to know .. the flux between free market capitalist, socialists and fascists.

[lwaxanatroi]

See, this is why having a real, functioning United Nations is a good idea. Even the pacifists among us can understand that what we now call a failed state, a place of lawlessness run by criminals, is a danger to the world. Once upon a time, the rest of the world could ignore such places, let the warlords fight it out over scraps of barren land. But today those places are tinderboxes of hatred that can be exported with one plane ticket. So it truly is in the best interests of the United States to keep such places from becoming terrorist havens.

The problem is that our military is not geared toward nation-building. It fights and wins wars, but when those wars are done, they become occupiers and no one likes to be occupied. Someone, however, needs to build the nation if the nation is going to leave the failed state category. After WWII, we had the Marshall Plan in Europe and a lot of effort in Japan and new, successful nations emerged. FDR, I believe, hoped that the United Nations would become the heir to the Marshall Plan, with an international military arm to keep the peace as nations were built or refurbished or put back on the straight and narrow. A strong, respected UN could enter Afghanistan with a multinational force which would be resented far less than a (primarily) one-country force is now.

But we don't have a strong, respected UN. Too bad.

[MosheDayanHero]

Should we get out of Afghanistan?

Of course we should leave.
When Taliban/Al Qaeda is defeated and/or demoralized, some semblance of order restored, some infrastructure is built and Afghan national army is in place.
How long it'll take? When U,.S. has a President capable of making the correct choices, maybe a few years.

[texastrixie]

Part II

Now, enter Obama. He really got that Peace Prize in an effort to give him some solace for another plate of Bush ________, which he is supposed to eat. The country is tired of war, thanks to the Iraq debacle. The country is broke, thanks to the Bush (non)economic policy. If we even wanted to drag Afghanistan into this century, we don't have the money to do it. We might have gotten a good start if we could have saved that trillion dollars we wasted on Iraq and used some of it to modernize the Afghan economy to do something besides use their entire country as drug dealer's crib.

Right now, we still need to keep some semblance of a presence in Afghanistan to help us fight the real problem - terrorists in Pakistan. And Engel says that Pakistan is working on this problem and deserves more credit. Since Engel has been there and I haven't, I will give him the benefit of the doubt, although I never have seen Pakistan as working diligently to weed out terrorists.

I still think travel from the US to Pakistan should be stopped. We don't seem capable of investigating people who go back and forth between the two countries, and we know they are training terrorists in Pakistan. Yes, its only a few people, but allowing even one person to go for a visit and return (who then plots to blow people up) is like inviting a serial killer home to

[texastrixie]

I saw Engel on MSNBC tonight flacking his special on Sunday nite which I guess I will watch (but it will be like having dental surgery). As much as I would like to just avoid thinking about Afghanistan, if even half of what Engel says is right, we are in real trouble.

No one agrees with me, but I have always thought that "nation-building" is not something you can just transfer to another locality much like a "see one-do one-teach one" skill. A nation can only be "built" or fundamentally changed if the population wants it. You can't inspire people to want democracy or equality. People have to want these things themselves.

Engel says that the Afghan population really don't mind the Taliban enough to want to fight and die to get them out. And I suspect that most of the male population of Afghanistan would prefer the Taliban's subservient, uneducated, sex slave version of womanhood than any type of democracy where women might want to do something weird, like have an opinion about something.

Afghanistan really doesn't want to leave the 16th century (except for cell phones, guns, and whatever forbidden pleasures most of them secretly indulge in).

[Jeffreygeez]

It all boils down to this when you invade a country for your own reasons:

As an Iraqi man said years ago: If you (America) could make Iraq heaven on earth, we do not want it from you!

Unless you understand the mentality of that statement you will never understand why we are resented when we help(free?) countries.Human pride and dignity exists everywhere.


Even the least educated citizen of a country knows a self serving scam when they see it.