Nightly News   |  April 03, 2011

Richard Engel on Libya, Afghanistan

NBC's chief foreign correspondent discusses what the riots in Afghanistan might mean for the region with Lester Holt, and gives an update on the action in Libya from Benghazi.

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This content comes from Closed Captioning that was broadcast along with this program.

>>> our chief foreign correspondent richard engel joins us now. richard, we are supposed to be months awith a i from the beginning of a drawdown in afghanistan. you have spent a lot of time there you know u.s. commanders, a lot of their successen haas been built on gain the trust of local leaders in the communities. what does all this do to those efforts?

>> reporter: well, it clearly -- that trust hasn't been built upon and doesn't really even exist when one incident like this can create nationwide riots. the u.s. mission in afghanistan now is to use military force in order to build up the afghan government so that it can fight off the taliban. that mission exposed by this incident right now still appears very far away .

>> richard, let turn to what's going on in libya. you are in benghazi tonight. last night at this time we were reporting the end of u.s. combat operations there. i understand they have been extended. what can you tell us?

>> reporter: this is a big development, i think. as of today, as of last night when we spoke and then during the daylight hours today, the u.s. was not supposed to be fly anything more bombing missions, instead, just a support role, refueling jets, collecting intelligence but instead, at the request of nato there were more american bombing missions today attacking gadhafi's armored vehicles around sirt and not far from brega. now, according to pog officials, nato asked for this because of bad weather , but according to the agreement, nato was only supposed to ask for american military help under extreme circumstances, under emergencies. bad weather seems to be a fairly low threshold so i think it is going to be difficult if the u.s. wants to extricate itself from the military operation if nato continues to ask for help.

>> richard engel in benghazi, thanks.