Richard Engel Quotes
Rockets fired by the Taliban generally aren't guided.
The military attack on the Taliban was a great success and the regime was ousted very rapidly. Once the regime was displaced, however, the military was faced with an extremely decentralized country with sporadic resistance from Taliban sympathizers and with the tough task of rebuilding the dilapidated country.
The Pakistani Intelligence Service and the Pakistan Army were never under the control of the civilian government which wanted an alliance with the United States in the War on Terror. However, the Pakistani military and especially their intelligence service (ISI) wanted the support of Al Qaeda and the Muslim religious extremists in Pakistan in their endless crusade against India. The Afghanistan Taliban could not sustain their attacks if they were not given sanctuary, weapons, and supplies over the border in Pakistan, This was arranged and given the go ahead by the ISI. Holbrooke, with American responsibility for BOTH Afghanistan and Pakistan speculated that the war in Afghanistan would end if we attacked the Pakistani ISI and blocked their supply and sanctuary activities, hence the quotation. “The Wrong Enemy” was taken from this quote by Carlotta Gall in her book in the role of Pakistan in the Afghanistan War.
The Iraqi Army when first confronted by the ISIS forces literally dropped their uniforms and weapons and ran to melt into the civilian population. Many of the best Iraqi officers had been purged by the Sunni-dominated government because they were Shiite. Others because they had no political connections. That left an officer corps of cronies and incompetents to lead troops that had little loyalty to the national government and had no ideas why they should risk their life. They were much better equipped than ISIS because of their American supplied weapons, but they allowed ISIS to capture much of these. Ya’Alon and many others were very skeptical of the same army to do better the second time around.
Richard Engel is an American journalist and author who is NBC News' chief foreign correspondent. He was assigned to that position on April 18, 2008, after being the network's Middle East correspondent and Beirut Bureau chief. Engel was the first broadcast journalist recipient of the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for his report "War Zone Diary".
