Kerry: ‘No military solution’ in Pakistan or Afghanistan

There is no purely military strategy the U.S. can pursue to win its war against terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) said Thursday.

“There is no military solution to what is happening in either Pakistan or Afghanistan,” Kerry told National Public Radio, after having returned from a trip overseas during last week’s congressional recess. The onetime Democratic presidential nominee spoke, based on a report he’d written for The Atlantic Council, of the need to provide more aid for the two countries.

“This is not some goo-goo, do-gooder policy,” Kerry added. “This is in our interest, to try to empower moderate, secular governments to take control of areas which, for too long, have been ceded to the bad guys.”

“We’re going to transform the aid package that we’re delivering to Pakistan,” Kerry said. “We’re going to be very directly involved in the oversight and accountability, which did not occur in the previous years.”

Kerry, who also controversially met during his trip with the president of Syria — a nation deemed as a state sponsor of terror by the State Department, said he is convinced that Syria has the ability to have an impact on the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians.

Listen to the audio of the Kerry interview here.