Imagine having a loved one fighting on the frontline in Afghanistan and reading this story, as if worrying they’re going to get killed isn’t bad enough, now you have the added grief of knowing it would be for a war their CiC has no intention of winning…

(Politico)- Richard Holbrooke, U.S. special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, downplayed news reports of American “peace talks” with Taliban leaders, but he acknowledged that a “pure military victory” in Afghanistan “is not possible.”

“I’m not in the spin patrol of the people who are giddy with optimism on the op-ed pages of some papers, or the people who say it’s another Vietnam and it’s hopeless. It’s certainly not another Vietnam, … and it is certainly not hopeless,” Holbrooke said Sunday during an appearance on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.”

“But anyone who doesn’t recognize what a daunting task it is is misleading. And the American public should understand that this is not going to be solved overnight. It is going to be a difficult struggle. It has a political component. We are not trying to win this war militarily, … but some kind of political element to this is essential and we are looking at every aspect of this. We are talking to all our other nations about it.”

Zakaria interrupted, asking: “What do mean when you say you don’t want to win this militarily?”

“I didn’t say we don’t want to win this militarily. I said we can’t win it militarily because a pure military victory is not possible, as Gen. [David] Petraeus and his colleagues have repeatedly said,” Holbrooke replied, adding that both Pakistani and Taliban leaders need to be engaged on a political level.

“Everybody understands that the Taliban is part of the fabric of recent Afghan political life,” Holbrooke said. “They were a government that controlled the country until 9/11.”

Earlier in the interview, he warned the media against calling the discussions “peace talks” or “negotiations,” since the Taliban are a loosely organized insurgency.

“A peace deal requires agreements, and you don’t make agreements with your friends, you make agreements with your enemies. But in this particular case, … there is no clear single address that you go to,” Holbrooke said. “There’s Ho Chi Minh; there’s no Palestinian Authority.”