And we are in the offices of Senator John Kerry, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. Senator, thanks for having us.

SENATOR JOHN KERRY (D-MA), CHAIRMAN, SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE: My pleasure. Thanks for coming.

ZAKARIA: What was your reaction to the wiki logs?

KERRY: I think -- well, my initial reaction was some concern because of the reports about the ISI. But once we got a chance to really examine the documents and get the timeline, I think they're not particularly revelational at all.

We knew almost everything that's there. It gives a little color to the battlefield struggles and to, you know, some of the difficulties within the villages and so forth. But basically, they are an incomplete presentation of the challenge and not particularly game-changing.

ZAKARIA: You remember what it was like when the Pentagon papers were released --

KERRY: I sure do.

ZAKARIA: -- in 1971.

KERRY: Yes, big-time.

ZAKARIA: You were in a very different place then, but you don't see these as comparable?

KERRY: Not in the least. Not in the least and I'll tell you why. the Pentagon papers revealed government, our government, that had been engaged in a long pattern of deception with the American people. There's no such thing here.

ZAKARIA: I want to spend some time, since we're talking to you about the central player in all of this, who is of course Hamid Karzai, our ally, the president of Afghanistan.

And so much of the conversation has swirled around the issue of is he trustworthy, is he somebody we can deal with. You've spent hours with him. In fact, there was a very important moment where the administration asked you to be effectively the principal negotiator for the United States on some very tense issues. How do you find him?

KERRY: I find him to be a very interesting person with a certain skill set and like anybody in public life, myself included, we all have our foibles, our down sides, flaws, whatever you want to call them.

ZAKARIA: Does he deliver on what he tells you that he will deliver --

KERRY: He delivers -- well, he did in the time we sat down. There are problems today and a lot of people have been engaged with President Karzai in discussing how to approach those problems. We need more progress. There's no question about it.

But I believe we make a mistake if we put all of our energy into churning around, you know, this question can we work with him. He's our -- he's the president.

He's the guy we've got to work with and I find that he is a patriot who wants his country to succeed, who has a better understanding of a lot of parts of the country than we do, and we need to listen to him a little bit, too even as we push him continually to improve the delivery of government services.

That is the key. The biggest single recruitment support factor for the Taliban today is not the presence of American troops, though that has some impact.

It is the lack of adequate governance and the fury building up within the afghan people about the inadequacy of their own government. That's pushing people towards something else, and too often that something is the Taliban.

ZAKARIA: That's a tall order. You're asking the Afghan government to develop a kind of coherence, legitimacy, and competence that it hasn't had for 30 years, and some would say even before that it was a weak central government --

KERRY: Always has been.

ZAKARIA: You're trying to kind of fast-forward modernization --

KERRY: Not what I'm doing. No, that's not what I'm doing and that would be a big mistake if that were the pattern we were trying to follow.

And I don't believe that's what the administration is trying to do. I think the administration has a pretty good sense, darn good sense, as a matter of fact, of exactly how difficult it would be to create this centralized model. And they don't want that.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that the administration is fundamentally on the right course, tactically, strategically in Afghanistan?

KERRY: Fundamentally, I think the administration has a very good sense of how difficult this is, and you know, the president has purposefully set the goals that he set with respect to transition because he wants to underscore to the Afghans themselves and to the Pakistanis.

That they need to begin to make this their battle and the only way to get them to do that is for them not to believe you're there forever. It's a delicate balance, obviously.

But you don't need 150,000 troops on the ground at a million dollars a troop, or whatever it is, in order to be able to achieve the goals that we have.

ZAKARIA: But do you think that come next July, when the deadline is on us for the beginning of the drawdown, that there will be a drawdown from Afghanistan and that it will not be trivial, it will be --

KERRY: Well, I'm not going to speak to the triviality or whatever it is, or the numbers. I think it would be a mistake to do that. I think the president is determined to begin to turn a corner.

He is also determined not to undermine his own effort and not to undermine the military effort on the ground and the sacrifice that our troops have made. The president is not going to suddenly pull the rug out from under the very efforts that we've all been engaged in over these years. That would be folly and I don't see him doing that.

ZAKARIA: What if General Petraeus says I need more time, I need maybe even 10,000 more troops? What would you do?

KERRY: I personally would say no, I don't think troops are the answer. The answer is a political resolution and that political resolution has to come about by engaging to a greater degree with India, with Pakistan itself.

But I think we should also engage China, Russia, and I would say to you that the possibility could exist even of Iran playing a role in helping to change the equation on the ground.

ZAKARIA: And you would talk to Iran about that?

KERRY: Absolutely. You bet I would. I think it could become a way even to get in on the other issues of concern to us, not just nuclear but the whole regional issue.

But I think Iran has interests in Afghanistan. They don't like the Taliban. They don't like narcotics being transited. There are reason that's they would want a stable government there.

And I think that we should -- you know, diplomacy is the art of playing to everybody's interests and everybody has some interests with respect to this outcome.

ZAKARIA: What about you? Talking about political settlement. You're talking about talking to people. What about talking to the Taliban? You know that Karzai claims that he wants to do it and part of what's --

KERRY: Well, I think the administration absolutely has to be involved. There is no way for it to work without that. There are complications with President Karzai being involved on his own because you have Uzbek, Tajik, Hazara, and others who are greatly concerned.

That all you have is, one, possibly a Karzai family deal and they're left out, or you have a Pashtun deal and they're left out. Either way, they're left out. You have to have a broad base that brings a whole lot of players to the table. It's a very complex negotiation.

ZAKARIA: But we don't seem to be engaged in it. We seem to be waiting and watching. The military seems to want to clobber the Taliban more before they -- it's like a guy with --

KERRY: Well-I think there's a feeling --

ZAKARIA: We're waiting for the stock to rise before we sell it. Why don't we just get in and start doing this?

KERRY: That's a good way to put it. Well, Leon Panetta testified before Congress about a month ago that he saw no predilection by the Taliban to want to negotiate or convert at this point because they think they're doing fine.

And there's a general perception that you've got to change the balance in the field a little here, and that's part of the reason for the surge.

And remember, the surge has not yet in effect, you know, taken hold. Not everybody's there. Not everybody's deployed. The Kandahar operation, other things, have not yet been put in place. So I think you have to wait and any judgment about that is premature.

ZAKARIA: Do you think that the Democratic Party will wait? The president does not seem to have a lot of support in his own party. KERRY: Well, Fareed, I've been through this. I guess I -- you know the old saying, I've seen this movie before.

ZAKARIA: And it didn't end up very well the last time.

KERRY: Yes, it didn't end up very well. But this is very, very different, very, very different. In Vietnam, we were fighting a proxy war in the cold war. We jumped in the middle of a civil war. That's not where we are here yet. It's not a civil war yet in Afghanistan.

There is an insurgency that has a history of being linked to an organization that attacked the United States of America and not only have they done it in the past, they continue to do it now.

And most recently the New York City bombing attempt that came out of Pakistan is linked to this whole unsettled region, the Jihadism that has a bad history of coming out of there.

ZAKARIA: But my -- my point is the Democratic Party is the place where you see --

KERRY: Well, here's -- I'm a Democrat, and I'll tell you, I think that it's important to remind our party and people in this country of what our real national security challenges are. You know, I give the administration huge credit. They have targeted and gone after and had a significant success.

They should be talking about it more about the way in which they have actually put al Qaeda under pressure. To walk away from that or to diminish that I think would -- you know, history would be pretty harsh in its judgment of where we wound up there.

And it's up to President Karzai to seize this opportunity. This isn't a one-sided deal and that's where he's got to kind of step up now and help to make things happen more on the ground.

We have a right to ask that. We have a right to expect that and he has an obligation, frankly, to deliver that.

ZAKARIA: And we will be back with John Kerry, senator from Massachusetts, in a moment.

KERRY: We need to make sure people understand how difficult this road has been against constant, non-stop republican obstructionism.

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ZAKARIA: And we are back with Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Let's talk about some other issues. You have long supported the idea of a more active engagement with Iran.

KERRY: Yes.

ZAKARIA: Does the fact of the green revolution, the fact that you had these people out on the streets, that they were brutally suppressed, that the regime appears to be more fragile, does all that mean that this would not be the right moment to be trying to do it?

KERRY: Well, it certainly hasn't been the right moment from the moment that that happened. I think we have to respect the effort of people on the ground at that moment of time.

But I think that time has now passed and it's clear to me and most of the intelligence community and people who report from there and elsewhere that that regime is not about to topple tomorrow or in the near term.

So we have an obligation to try to engage and have some discussion. That doesn't mean we have an obligation to give in on anything. That's not the nature of diplomacy or negotiation, but we do have to get there somehow. I think the stakes are too high.

ZAKARIA: The administration seems like it's paralyzed right now. Should it --

KERRY: No, I don't think it is. I think it's unfair to say the administration is paralyzed.

ZAKARIA: They're not moving forward.

KERRY: Well, you know, there's a moment for everything. I think right now everybody needs some signs from Iran that there is something legitimate to actually talk about, not just an excuse to step away or to kind of get out from under sanctions or something.

ZAKARIA: Let me ask you a little about politics. You are the --

KERRY: Politics.

ZAKARIA: -- the senior Democrat in a state that began the conversation about President Obama's weakness with Scott Brown's election. Is President Obama doing badly in the polls, is this likely to pass?

KERRY: I think what's happened is, Fareed, that in the last six months I think there was an article even in the paper this week about people no longer blaming Bush. They're beginning to target this White House.

That's a natural course of events as you go through any administration, but I don't think it's fair to the president. The president has passed -- I mean, think about what's happened. We just passed the most significant and important financial regulatory reform, legislation, in 40, 50 years or something.

And the entire conversation was about Mrs. Sherrod's firing for three days. I mean, nobody heard about this. I think that part of the problem is that a lot has been accomplished, but the story has not been sufficiently told.

And we need to go out with some passion and energy and a little bit of anger even and make sure people understand how difficult this road has been against constant, non-stop Republican obstructionism. I mean, everything requires a cloture vote, 60 votes. We have judges who are held up, and then they get 90 votes when the vote finally comes or 95 votes. I think it's frankly an insult to the Senate what's been going on, to the institution, to the Congress, to the American people that everything is a no.

Not even a legitimate effort to try to work out a decent energy bill. The night after we announced we didn't have 60 votes to do something serious about global climate change, China announced that they're going to price carbon.

China is going to price carbon and the United States of America is sitting on its hands. Two years ago, China produced 5 percent of the solar panels of the world. Today, they produce 60 percent.

If we sit on our hands much longer, we're going to be written out of the marketplace in these technologies and the United States is going to be clawing at trying to make up for jobs and opportunities over the course of the next years.

We're cutting our own throats here and it is the most serious dereliction of duty in my judgment, and we have done more despite the obstructionism than any Congress since Franklin Roosevelt.

That's not a bad record. We have not translated that into the impact that it's in fact had on people's lives, and we need to translate that over the course of these next months.

ZAKARIA: Senator Kerry, pleasure to have you on.

KERRY: My pleasure. Thank you. Good to see you.