MS. ROMANO: Okay, good. Let's move to Afghanistan. You are sounding more and more skeptical about launching a new broad counter-insurgency.
SENATOR KERRY: I don't want us to launch additional troops until we have thoroughly vetted exactly what their mission will be and what the possibilities are of achieving it, so where the difficulties are.
The fact is that we've been through this before. You know, in Vietnam, we heard the commanding general on the ground saying we need more troops. We heard the President of the United States say if we just put in more troops, we're going to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
And the fact is that they were wrong because they never examined the underlying assumptions on which our involvement was based.
We are ostensibly in Afghanistan to prevent alQaeda from reconstituting itself in Afghanistan and also to guarantee the stability of Pakistan. We have to make certain that the counterinsurgency we engage in is properly linked to the level of counterterrorism we need to prevent alQaeda from coming back, but I'm not sure that that requires rebuilding all of Afghanistan --we haven't determined yet how much of it we need to do.
It may be that we will all decide we need additional troops to accomplish the mission as defined and that is properly defined, but there's a big question looming which wasn't around last year, and that is the degree to which the current government of Afghanistan has proven itself to be incapable of delivering services, even corrupt, andand dysfunctional. And that is a central component of any counterinsurgency strategy.
So I want to make certain that we're not committing the troops to something that , by definition, is unachievable. Once we know the answer to those questions, we make our determination of how to go forward.
00:13:10 I am not talking about just getting out. I am not talking about, you know, somehow severing America's involvement there. That would be an enormous mistake for any number of reasons, Pakistan, alQaeda, and other, you know, issues globally.
00:13:30 The issue here is how do we best achieve which mission, and I think it's not properly vetted yet.
<...>
MS. ROMANO:
Are you prepared to buck the administration on this? There seems to be kind of this force of-- SENATOR KERRY:
Sure. No, I'm prepared. Look, I'm recognize our separate constitutional responsibilities. I have lived through a period when they weren't properly exercised, you know, once when I served in the military and once here in the Senate and in Iraq, and I think we've all learned some tough lessons since then.
My obligation is to the citizens of Massachusetts and to my oath as a Senator and to the constitutional responsibility we have in the Senate to share in, you know, foreign policy and in war-making. MS. ROMANO: Karzai government. Things have changed a little bit since last year, and, in fact, we've criticized the election, and he's alluded to the fact he doesn't want us there. Are we fast approaching a moment where we're not, you know, considered helpers anymore, that we're considered occupiers? That's my first
SENATOR KERRY: Well, we have to be very, very careful of the occupier label. There are those who view that. I know that General McChrystal and others are very sensitive to that. Ambassador Eikenberry. That's why, again, the shape of our footprint on the ground in Afghanistan is really critical here.
We're in a moment of uncertainty here simply because the election isn't even finished. We presume Karzai is the victor and the government, you know--and he's been so, you know, labeled publicly, but the process is going to have to be healed, and unless President Karzai indicates a very clear way in which he is prepared to do that, I think counterinsurgency is going to be very, very difficult, and those are questions I want to ask, which is why I'm going over to Pakistan and Afghanistan in about 10 days or so to spend as much time as I can face to face with General McChrystal and with Ambassador Eikenberry and with leaders in Pakistan and others to really vet, as thoroughly as possible, all of the questions. And believe me, there are literally hundreds of questions.
I think it's very important to ask many of these questions publicly, those that can be, and to bring the American people into this discussion, so that when we make a decision going forward, people won't say, "Whoa. Where's that come from?" or, you know, there's a sense of transparency and accountability to this.
MS. ROMANO:
Okay. Let's move to Iran....Do you believe that diplomacy can work? SENATOR KERRY:
Well, diplomacy always has a possibility of working, and you always have an obligation to exhaust the diplomatic possibilities before there's some dire emergency that requires an immediate military response before you decide to engage in that kind of response.
We have yet to thoroughly exhaust the possibility. In fact, we have barely initiated those possibilities. A lot of that will depend on Iran. A lot of it is out of our hands. I mean, Iran is going to have to make some fundamental decisions about where it wants to go and what kind of country it wants to be. They have a big obligation to step up in Geneva and defuse this.
They have, after all, misled people. They have not been transparent and accountable. They refuse to answer the questions or allow inspections in critical cases, and so the obligation is on them to come clean here, and I think the administration has appropriately put that to them. And that's the test that will take place in Geneva.
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