Another John Kerry 'flip-flop'?

Sen. John Kerry seems to have confused the Washington press corps. Fresh from Afghanistan, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman delivered a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday that caused The Post to report that he ???opposes sending more troops to Afghanistan??? and the Los Angeles Times to conclude that ???he would support a decision by President Obama to send some additional troops.??? Was Kerry for the troop increase before he was against it -- all in the same speech? Not exactly. Instead the Massachusetts Democrat's complicated position sounded like an attempt to fudge the difference between supporters and opponents of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's request for 40,000 reinforcements. In that respect, Kerry -- who served as a de facto White House representative in talks last week with Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- may have been offering a hint of where Obama, who also seems to be searching for a middle ground, may end up. As Stephen Biddle, an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, pointed out in today's Post story, Kerry agrees with most of McChrystal's plan for Afghanistan. They both say that better Afghan governance is essential, that the Taliban cannot be allowed to regain control over large parts of the country, that a reorganization and escalation of civilian development efforts is essential, and that the Afghan army must be prepared as quickly as possible to take over the fight. Their only real difference is on the politically explosive troop increase. Kerry said McChrystal's central option, for 40,000 more troops, ???reaches too far, too fast.??? His argument is that there are not yet enough Afghan troops or government structures to accompany American soldiers into areas they clear, which means that the key second and third phases of counterinsurgency -- ???hold??? and ???build??? -- could not be carried out. But Kerry also suggested that as more troops are trained and capable local government officials recruited, and ???we can be confident that military efforts can be sustained and built upon, then I would support the president??? sending additional troops. He went on to say those troops could be sent in smaller batches over a longer period than proposed by McChrystal; each new brigade, he argued, would anyway take three months to deploy. I suspect that some of Obama's advisers are thinking along the same lines as Kerry. Afghanistan would get more troops, but only slowly, and only in tandem with improvements with its government and army. This has a sensible, pay-as-you-go ring to it; it also might diffuse the political problem of asking Congress to fund 40,000 more troops -- at about $40 billion -- all at once. The problem with Kerry's thinking is that it sidesteps one of the central points made by McChrystal: The Taliban is currently winning the war, and unless its momentum is reversed in the next year, it may prove impossible to implement the larger strategy. As Kerry himself acknowledged, many Afghans are choosing sides in the war based on which side they believe has the upper hand, and right now they are betting on the Taliban. Sending troops in dribs and drabs won't change that reality -- and it may condemn the soldiers already there to fighting and dying without the chance of winning. On Sunday's Opinion page I quoted Kerry, famously a Vietnam Veteran, as saying that, ???One of the lessons of Vietnam is if you are going to send American forces into harm's way, you don't do it in a limited way. You don't do it tying hands behind your back ahead of time. You don't ask people to give their lives for something less than the prospect of success.??? He said that in 1999, during a debate about the U.S. intervention in Kosovo. But it's a lesson that applies equally to the way the Afghan war has been conducted so far -- and how it might continue, if Kerry has his way.