"The Administration has replaced, or revised, or expanded the G.W.O.T. with a new phrase: “a global struggle against violent extremism.” The war is now a struggle. The terrorist enemy is now the violent extremist enemy. The focus has shifted from a tactic to an ideology. In a major new strategy document quoted in U.S. News & World Report, the Pentagon is even more specific (and more accurate), venturing onto delicate ground by calling the threat “Islamist extremism” and “extremist Sunni and Shia movements that exploit Islam for political ends.” In June, a Marine lieutenant general, Wallace Gregson, floated the new thinking in a speech: “This is no more a war on terrorism than the Second World War was a war on submarines,” he said.

Read the comment by George Packer in the New Yorker