Obama: US should reach out to Taliban moderates
President Obama raised the possibility Friday that his administration might be willing to reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan to help stabilize the region -- an approach similar to tactics used with Sunni militias in Iraq.
When asked in an interview with the New York Times whether the United States was winning the war in Afghanistan, Obama said bluntly, "No.'' He said the United States should shift its approach.
(AP)
"If you talk to Gen. [David H.] 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 because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of al-Qaida in Iraq. There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and the Pakistani region."
In the wide-ranging interview aboard Air Force One, Obama also took on other topics, including the economy, saying Americans need to be "prudent":
• "There are still groceries to be bought and kids to send to school and cars in need of repair and young families that need to find homes. And so what I would say to people is, obviously, be prudent.
"I think that ordinary families should have learned from the last few years and recent history that if something sounds too good to be true -- whether it's stock market returns or appreciating housing prices -- that sometimes they are too good to be true, and that what we should be looking for is steady growth, steady accumulations of savings, steady and prudent investing.
"What I don't think people should do is suddenly stuff money in their mattresses and pull back completely from spending. . . . But I think that coming out of this crisis, what you're going to see is, you know, a return to the fundamentals -- hard work, investing for reasonable returns over time, saving steadily for your kids' college education and for your retirement. All of us, thinking about our purchases and making sure that we're taking care of the necessities before we go after the luxuries. And I think that's true not only for individual families, but I think that's going to be true for government as well. And if we take those steps, if we return to the fundamentals ... we [can] go back to that ad that used to run, where they say, you know, 'We earn money the old fashioned way.'"