Reply #21: JK article in "The Hill" (7-27)(-intro to SFRC panel) [View All]

[MBS]

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/111163-options-for-reconciliation-in-afghanistan-sen-john-kerry

some excerpts. .

. .. There are a lot of questions, which is entirely appropriate. Today’s hearing is really to try and focus on the issue of reconciliation and see what role that might play in achieving a political solution in the end. And I think we have a very thoughtful panel to consider those issues. . .
. . .I want to say a couple of words about the leaked documents on Afghanistan and Pakistan yesterday. I think it is important to not overhype or get excessively excited about the meaning of those documents. Certainly to those of us that lived through the Pentagon papers and a different period, there is no relationship whatsoever to that event or to those documents. In fact, these documents in many cases reflect a very different pattern of involvement by the U.S. government from that period of time.

For all of us, the release of any classified information—I think this needs to be stated—is unacceptable. It breaks the law. And equally important, it compromises the efforts of our troops in the field and has the potential of putting people in harm’s way.

These documents appear to be primarily raw intelligence reports from the field. And as such, anybody who has dealt with these reports knows that some are completely dismissible, some of them are completely unreliable, and some of them are very reliable. But raw intelligence needs to be processed properly, generally by people who have a context in which to put it. And so I think people need to be very careful in evaluating what they do read there.

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. . ..
. . . I will make a final comment before we get back to our panel. I really believe that, in the amount of space we are trying to operate in Afghanistan and the numbers of troops we have allied together, there are just some inherent limits that the Taliban have come to understand better perhaps than others. Clearly, we have to operate within this political reality. I can’t say it enough times: I believe that Pakistan is more crucial to the outcome than what happens in Afghanistan itself in many cases. And I think that remains true today.