US Secretary of State, John Kerry Kermie the Froggie went a-courtin he did ride ah hum

US, China and playful AfPak frogs ~28Mar'13, By M K Bhadrakumar

 "... Peter Tomsen who was president Ronald Reagan's special envoy to the Mujahideen in the 1980s and is undoubtedly a richly experienced regional expert - he was inexplicably marginalized, though, by the late Richard Holbrooke -    "The merchant can load frogs on one tray .. But as he begins to load the second tray, some of the frogs on the first one will inevitably jump off. And as he reloads them, frogs on the second tray will leap to the ground.  Eventually, even the most determined merchant will give up .. [John Kerry met again Tuesday with Afghan President Hamid Karzai] .. Tomsen's prognosis might well be turning out to be the miserable fate of the United States today in Afghanistan as time is running out and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's troop withdrawal has begun in earnest, while on the parallel track the peace talks with the Taliban are yet to begin with any seriousness .. In fact, the situation is even more complicated today than what Tomsen could have expected in the late 1980s when he struggled with the moody Majahideen groups based in Peshawar under Pakistani military's supervision.  For one thing, the merchant's basket today contains many more frogs than during the "Afghan jihad"

and it also contains now a Big Frog ....

.. The past 72 hours must have been a chastening experience for US Secretary of State John Kerry. After an unpublicized dinner meeting with the Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kiani at Amman on Sunday, where they apparently hit it off with some soldier-to-soldier talk and agreed on the need to quickly commence the peace talks with the Taliban at the Qatari capital of Doha, Kerry flew into Kabul the next morning on an unscheduled visit reasonably certain that he had cut a deal with the Big Frog the previous night ... continue~http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/SOU-03-280313.html