The Afghanistan 2011 Kerry trip was a visit John Kiriakou made to Afghanistan as senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then chaired by John Kerry. After landing at Bagram Airbase, the pair sat through a briefing with 11 generals, ranging from one to four stars, who presented a slide-by-slide account of the war effort that was, in Kiriakou’s telling, entirely rosy — the U.S. moving here, beating the Taliban there, driving them back everywhere.[1]
Coming out of the briefing, Kerry remarked that the U.S. might actually win the war. Kiriakou told him otherwise: the Afghan government under Hamid Karzai was, in effect, only “the mayor of Kabul,” with the Taliban controlling the rest of the country — and, Kiriakou noted, the same optimistic briefing had been given to visiting officials every year since 2002.[2]