US President Barack Obama has raised the possibility of reaching out to moderate Islamists in Afghanistan in an attempt to end the ongoing insurgency there. In an interview with the New York Times, published on its Web site on Saturday, Obama admitted that the US was not winning the war and suggested the way forward may involve employing strategies used in Iraq.

The violence in Afghanistan is at its highest level since the ousting of the Taliban in 2001 and last month the new president approved the deployment of 17,000 more US troops in an effort to stabilize the country. In the interview, Obama pointed to the successes of the policy used by Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq of reaching out to Sunni Muslim leaders who had become increasingly alienated by the violent tactics of al-Qaida. The president, however, acknowledged that the situation in Afghanistan is more complicated. "You have a less governed region, a history of fierce independence among tribes," he said.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai welcomed the White House's new openness for dialogue. "This is good news," he said on Sunday in Kabul, "this is approval of our previous stance and we accept it and praise it."

Obama has charged the former CIA official Bruce Riedel with drafting a policy review on the war in Afghanistan, which should be delivered before the president heads to the NATO summit in early April. Vice President Joe Biden is laying the ground work for that meeting, holding talks with NATO allies in Brussels on Tuesday. This follows meetings between Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the alliance's foreign ministers last week.

On Monday German newspapers grapple with Obama's willingness to speak to moderate Taliban. There is cautious optimism from some quarters while other papers warn that Afghanistan is very different from Iraq.

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:

"Anyone who envisages holding talks with the Taliban, as President Obama has done recently, is both right and wrong at the same time. It is right that there are different levels of fanaticism within the Taliban. That makes it possible to speak with some of the leaders and to get them out of the structure by promising them immunity from prosecution and influence on the community. It would be wrong, however, to treat the Taliban as a single unified organization or to negotiate with the founder Mullah Omar. That will not bring peace."

"The Afghan people do not fundamentally reject the Taliban's ideas. There is a lot of acceptance of their religious strictness and their perception of women. The brutality, the excesses of the Sharia catalogue of punishments and the loss of some freedoms associated with fundamentalism are the things that have met with resistance. Negotiations with Taliban leaders would only serve to break the power of the hardliners and to split the group. However, this must go hand in hand with an acceptance of the society's return to a stricter Islam. All of this cannot be achieved by means of a grand strategy but rather in painstaking work district by district."

"Obama's problem is that he will have to arouse enthusiasm among his strategists and his own people for these Afghan subtleties. A blanket policy of reconciliation aimed at a 'the' Taliban is not possible and won't work."

The conservative Die Welt writes:

"Iraq is not Afghanistan. (Iraq) is a country with a sophisticated cultural history and a distinct experience of administration. In (Afghanistan) there has never been a democracy and there is neither a functioning civil society nor a central power. Afghan society is structured along tribal lines. That poses both risks and opportunities. It should be possible to win over the powerful tribes that are friendly with the Taliban -- including those in Pakistan. Not every Islamic fundamentalist is a Taliban. The opportunity and challenge that faces the new US administration is finding those Islamists who are willing to cooperate."

The Financial Times Deutschland writes:

"In Iraq, an anti-American alliance between the local Sunni population and mostly foreign al-Qaida fighters broke up because the terror and the demand for total power eventually became unbearable to the locals. The partners became bitter enemies."

"The US military used this quarrel to present themselves as the new strong partner to the Sunni militia. This is why the invitation to Sunnis to take part in the political process in Iraq succeeded."

"This strategic innovation was not an offer of dialogue with 'moderate Sunnis,' but the willingness of the US to work closely together with former enemy fighters. Al-Qaida was not convinced and gradually pacified but rather defeated by the use of force."

"It is far from clear if similar conditions for an alliance exist in the Afghan mountains."

The left-leaning Berliner Zeitung writes:

"The readiness to negotiate could be seen as a first signal that the Americans … want to leave Afghanistan sooner rather than later. First of all they have to find the moderate Taliban and speak with them."

"The most important and at the same time most difficult task facing the Americans is to make an offer that the Taliban cannot refuse. That can only mean: Those who lay down their weapons are rewarded by being given some responsibility in Afghanistan. Those who don't shoot should be allowed to make decisions and have a say in how the country is run. … If these offers are made and accepted then it is completely clear that Afghanistan will never become an exemplary democracy. It may not even become a democracy at all."