SFRC holding hearing on Afghanistan strategies right now.

We also know that this should not become a partisan issue. Democrats and Republicans alike can best support the President not by acting as a rubber stamp. We can help him best by asking tough questions, just as he is doing, and partnering with the Administration to craft policies that reflect the answers.

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First, it will be the Afghans who must ultimately win or lose the struggle with the Taliban. We need to ensure that the Afghan people feel a sense of ownership—not of occupation.

Second, as I warned back in February, we need to recognize that we are in a race against time in Afghanistan. In a region suspicious of foreign troops, an open-ended obligation of large numbers of US troops risks consigning us to the same fate as others who tried to master Afghanistan. No matter how long we remain in Afghanistan, history should teach us that there will be no purely military solution in that country. What’s needed instead is a comprehensive strategy, one that emphasizes the need for the right civilian effort as much as for the right military deployment.

We must also understand Afghan realities and recognize the decentralized nature of Afghan society. That requires us to be flexible. Afghanistan is a very diverse place, and we need to understand that what works in Mazar-e Sharif, a predominantly Uzbek city that fought the Taliban tooth and nail in the 1990s, is very different from what works in Kandahar, a Pashtun city that welcomed the Taliban with open arms. It also requires us to be humble about our ability to bring large-scale change to other societies. That was true in Iraq, and it is even more true in Afghanistan. We have to weigh our choices against what is possible.

Most congressional hearings bring administration officials up for a grilling. Others present interest group-backed pseudo-experts to give canned analysis. Rarely do congressional hearings present eclectic analysts who address a given policy option from a first-principle perspective to an engaged group of lawmakers. Yet that’s exactly what happened Wednesday afternoon when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began what chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) described as a series of hearings about the war in Afghanistan.

Kerry assembled three experts to scrutinize the core issues at the heart of the war and the alternatives proposed to wage it: John Nagl, the president of the Center for a New American Security, a think tank that has provided significant personnel and intellectual heft to the Obama administration; Steve Biddle, an influential security expert with the Brookings Institution who advised Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recent review of Afghanistan strategy; and Rory Stewart, head of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, who wrote a widely read travelogue of his journeys through Afghanistan. Intellectual cleavages over both strategy and basic views of the war were apparent on the panel, with Nagl and Biddle supporting a more robustly resourced war with broader aims than Stewart endorsed. But both Nagl and Biddle grappled with the harder implications of such positions, with Nagl emphasizing the primacy of competent Afghan, not U.S., security forces, and Biddle equivocating on the overall importance of Afghanistan to U.S. interests.

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t was difficult to read the impact the testimony had on the assembled senators. Most, including Kerry, posed skeptical questions to all panelists, indicating a more open debate than the congressional debate over the Iraq war, which often devolved into questioning designed to elicit politically-useful responses. Kerry, for instance, has described the struggle against al-Qaeda as a “global counterinsurgency,” yet he aimed most of his more pointed questions at Nagl, who mostly agrees with that analysis.

Kerry said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had agreed to testify before the panel next month, after President Obama made a decision on whether to send additional troops to Afghanistan. Another hearing, on how to avoid failure in Afghanistan, is scheduled for Thursday morning, when the panel will hear from ret. Gen. Bantz Craddock, the former NATO commander; development expert Clare Lockhart; novelist Khaled Hosseini; and Ryan Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Pakistan.

In an opening statement at a hearing this afternoon on Afghanistan strategy -- previewed ably by Spencer Ackerman -- Senator John Kerry doesn't seem too comfortable at all with the administration's current plan. At one point he left his prepared remarks behind to recall when he was a young naval officer heading to Vietnam as President Lyndon Johnson and General William Westmoreland were constantly calling for more troops to achieve their adjustments without questioning crucial strategic assumptions like the "domino theory." Kerry concluded that we have to ask those fundamental questions now, saying...

I am concerned because at the very moment when our troops and our allies troops are sacrificing more and more, our plan, our path, and our progress seem to be growing less and less clear. ... no amount of money, no rise in troop levels, and no clever metrics will matter if the mission is ill conceived.

He seems to be thinking about a strategy that has a smaller footprint on the ground, noting that he doesn't believe the U.S. should be in Afghanistan to create a central government or a carbon-copy of U.S. democracy. Further,

... In a week when U.S. commandos killed a top al-Qaeda leader in Somalia without a major troop presence, we should be asking ourselves how much counterinsurgency and nation-building are required to meet a more limited set of goals.