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Originally Posted by Enigma
Every comparison you made per the enemy was an organized, uniformed military backed by a state or government. Terrorists are not. It's a big difference. You also clearly didn't read the article, either. And, the same question applies to you: Do you suppose that Secretary Gates, Gen. Petreus, and President Obama are all weak minded defeatists?
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"Terrorists" are terrorists because they engaging their enemy in a conventional way would see their demise quickly, while in earlier times they might have still been able to do that. Instead they learned to exploit the weaknesses of inter-Western relationships and its domestic policy by engaging in acts of terror. It is their most effective and only way to fight. That shouldn't stop us though from destroying them on open battlefields if they or their allies are foolish enough to go there, and neither from identifiying them as a hostile force against us that and whose sponsors must be destroyed / stopped / bullied.
To your second point: A military member, such as a General, can only act within the realms, limits and conditions set by the politicians. It is the politicians (and in a free society, also their voters) responsiblity to make sure that an effective campaign can be fought. If the military is constraint by politics, it might have to consider options it might not consider otherwise.
Anyway, if the General's ideas of talks are about "divide and conquer", I'm all for it.
But what Pres. Obama said was "No, we are not winning in Afghanistan" and "I would like to talk to them, but it's so difficult". **** that. If you figure you can't do it and achieve anything with it, then don't think aloud about it, because it's a sign of weakness for them. Oh, and saying "No, we are not winning" to international press is just that, too.
Oh, and btw:
""If you talk to Gen. Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us," said Obama.""
I thought there was no success in Iraq? Surely that was the notion that Pres. Obama built half his campaign on?
The US lost South-Vietnam because of the nuclear threat from the Soviet Union and because of the hippies back home. They might lose against the radical Islamic / Islamist threat for the same reasons, minus the nuclear threat, and this time with much worse implications for the West, especially Europe with her ever growing Muslim minorities.