Continuing my parsing of John Kerry’s pronouncements on Afghanistan, note these remarks Senator Kerry delivered at the opening of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan this afternoon:
I also want to emphasize that the events covered in these documents occurred before last December, when the President announced a new Afghanistan strategy clearly designed to address some of the very issues that are raised by these documents. Obviously in many cases, many of us have raised the issues in these documents with the Pakistanis and with the Afghans. And I’ll say a word more about that in a moment.
All of us, however, are concerned that after nearly nine years of war, more than 1,000 American casualties, and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, the Taliban appear to be as strong as they have been. And to successfully reverse that trend, it is going to be very important for us to depend on our partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
So far, the progressive wing of the Democratic party has stayed fairly loyal to President Obama’s war plan in Afghanistan. “Opposing” the war remains a relatively controversial position, even among fairly liberal elected Democrats like Kerry. This statement, though, sounds alot like Kerry is judging Obama’s year old Afghan war strategy to be a failure. If an establishment type like Kerry breaks with Obama I imagine he would take a bunch of people with him.