Overshadowed by John Kerry's embrace of a typically Kerry-ian middle-way strategy in Afghanistan was his response to a reporter's question about Hamid Karzai's alleged drug lord brother:
During our walk, we had a very direct conversation about that. In fact, he asked me about it, he raised the subject, quite interesting. And we talked about the perceptions of his brother.
Let me just say this in answer to this. I have requested from our intelligence sources and law enforcement folks the smoking gun, the evidence. Show me, what do we know?... And I'll tell you right now, folks, nobody has, nobody has. Nobody has given me the sort of hard-and-fast here's what we heard him say, or here's what we caught him doing, or here's what he's involved in, et cetera, so this swirls around.
That is definitely not the CW in the west. Hard to say whether Kerry is being an admirably rigorous thinker--or just going a little soft to repay the Afghan president for playing along with his pleadings to agree to a runoff election.