This guy has a funny definition of winning a war. Apparently it includes having your home and territory occupied for as long as the invader wants it. Your government elected on his terms and the majority of your own countrymen opposed to your actions which leads to your over reliance on foreign terrorists, which leads to more animosity from your neighbors.
Basically, you are powerless to do anything besides plant bombs that kill a small number of the enemy and huge numbers of your fellow citizens.
How can you lose?
I thought the same thing. The Islamists have not won anything in a military sense.They have figured out how to kill their own civilian populations and use that for propaganda purposes. That is all.
Anyone who needs to know how far America has come in fighting this type of war only needs to compare the disastrous Soviet campaign in Afghanistan and our own.
Also, the IDF was adept at beating the Arabs not because they were Arabs but because they were using Soviet and French weapons. Desert Storm showed the total ineffectiveness of Soviet weapons and led to the collapse of the Soviet Union a few months later. The timing was not a coincidence, yet I almost never see anyone point this out. Prior to Desert Storm the media had story after story about how powerful the Iraqi war machine was, how many tanks, planes etc, how our stuff was too pricey and complicated, and wouldn't work in the desert because one grain of sand would shut down the high tech gear, etc.
Those critics were dead wrong and so is this one. The current Islamist tactics rely totally on support of a leftist Western media to spread propaganda and rthey feed off of hand-wringing articles like this one. They think they are winning because the NYT says they are.
Ultimately the Islamists will lose the propaganda war because even Western societies have a limit to how much they will take. We have reached a point of "Islam-fatigue" and one more big act of terror is going to push us over the edge. It won't matter who is in the White House then. There will be a massive response.