‘What America needs today,” Sen. John Kerry insisted, “is a smarter, more comprehensive and far-sighted strategy for modernizing the Middle East.” We have to “draw on all of our nation’s strengths,” including “military might” and “the immense moral prestige of freedom and democracy.” Plus, he said, “the world’s largest economy” must invest heavily in education and infrastructure in the Middle East’s developing countries.

Dissections of counterinsurgency’s fine points were not yet in vogue when Kerry laid out this ambitious blueprint for nation-building — indeed, region-building. Other than that, though, he could have easily been describing the McChrystal plan for Afghanistan.

But this was at Georgetown University in early 2003. At the time, Afghanistan seemed to have been won, our war objectives — routing al-Qaeda and toppling its host regime, the Taliban — having been achieved. It would take more than six years, and a shift in Washington’s conventional wisdom to Kerry’s way of thinking, before there was a McChrystal plan. Now that that’s finally happened, what a surprise to find Senator Weathervane . . . opposed!

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Kerry has become one of President Obama’s top advisers on Afghanistan. This goes a long way toward explaining why administration policy is ever more incoherent as the central Asian basketcase — where 19 soldiers and three DEA agents have been killed in the last few days — becomes ever more lethal for American troops. It also means Kerry’s speech Monday at the Council on Foreign Relations can’t be dismissed as the usual yawner. It’s a reflection of the commander-in-chief’s thinking from an insider.

There’s an interesting symmetry between Kerry’s meanderings on McChrystal and the growing critique of Obama by nervous Democrats and moderates. After years of preaching the same gospel the general has proposed, Kerry is unable to bring himself to the conclusion that maybe nation-building in the Arab world isn’t such a great idea after all. So he is reduced to complaining that McChrystal’s plan to create a functional nation-state from scratch in a seventh-century society “reaches too far, too fast.”

Clearly, Kerry is signaling that the 40,000 in additional forces McChrystal has requested will be trimmed down if not rejected outright. The rationale he offers for this recent evolution in his thinking is not very convincing. The senator frets that “we do not yet have the critical guarantees of governance and development capacity,” as though corrupt and incompetent rulers in Afghanistan were something new. He also now realizes, he says, that our own strapped government lacks a civilian capability to dole out goodies (“tangible benefits”) to the hapless population we are struggling to protect — and without enough welfare, how can you expect Afghans to buy into their new welfare state?

And get this: It has suddenly dawned on Kerry (and Obama) that Afghanistan is without security forces and reliable government officials who can “partner” effectively with our troops — to “restore Afghans’ faith in their own government,” as if they ever had such a thing. This last epiphany is especially rich. President Obama selected General McChrystal and had him conduct a soup-to-nuts study of Afghanistan precisely because it was understood that the rudiments of governance were lacking. The general was not sent to deny al-Qaeda safe haven and topple the Taliban. We already did that — eight years ago.