WASHINGTON, Dec 16: Democratic Senator John Kerry stands tall as President Barack Obama’s good soldier.

Obama seems likely to reward him for his hard work by nominating the 69-year-old Kerry, perhaps in the coming days, to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as the top US diplomat.

Senator John McCain of Arizona, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, has taken to jokingly referring to Kerry as “Mr. Secretary.”

The Massachusetts lawmaker has flown to Afghanistan and Pakistan numerous times to tamp down diplomatic disputes, spending hours drinking tea and taking walks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai or engaging in delicate negotiations in Islamabad.

It's a highly unusual role for a Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman: envoy with a special but undefined portfolio.

Kerry has pushed the White House's national security agenda in the Senate with mixed results. He successfully ensured ratification of a nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia in 2010 and most recently failed to persuade Republicans to back a UN pact on the rights of the disabled.

Throughout this past election year, he skewered Obama's Republican rival, Mitt Romney, at nearly every opportunity, played the role of Romney in Obama's debate preparation, and was a vocal booster for the president's re-election. Kerry memorably told delegates at the Democratic National Convention in August: “Ask Osama bin Laden if he's better off now than he was four years ago.”

Kerry and McCain, defeated presidential candidates who returned to the Senate, have joined forces repeatedly during the past few decades.

Last year, Kerry and McCain were outspoken in pushing for a no-fly zone over Libya as Moammar Gadhafi's forces attacked rebels and citizens. This month, they stood together in arguing for the disabilities treaty against staunch Republican opposition and complaints that it could undermine US national sovereignty.

The pact fell five votes short of the two-thirds vote needed for ratification, and Kerry called it “one of the saddest days I've seen” in his years in the Senate.

“Today I understand better than ever before why Americans have such disdain for Congress and just how much must happen to fix the Senate so we can act on the real interests of our country,” he said, his frustration evident.    Kerry has travelled extensively for the administration, to Afghanistan in May as a strategic partnership agreement loomed large in the decade-plus war. He was in Pakistan last year in the midst of a diplomatic crisis after Raymond Davis, a CIA-contracted American spy, was accused of killing two Pakistanis.

Democratic Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, travelled to Pakistan around that time and recalled Kerry's influence.

“I arrived in Islamabad I think five days after Ray Davis had been taken into a jail in the Punjab and was at very real risk of being hauled out of the jail and lynched,” Coons said. “Senator Kerry was about to show up and negotiate on behalf of the administration. And it was clear that both the diplomats and the military folks wemet with viewed him as a real man of credibility and experience who was likely to contribute meaningfully to those negotiations.”

Davis pleaded self-defence. After weeks of wrangling between the US and Pakistan, he was released in exchange for “blood money” paid to the dead men's relatives.

This year, Kerry has presided over committee hearings on treaties and other major issues, but there has been little legislative work.—AP