WASHINGTON — Sen. Jack Reed will accompany Vice President-elect Joe Biden this week on a tour of southwest Asia — Biden’s last before he trades the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for his new job on Jan. 20.

“The purpose of this trip is fact-finding,” Biden spokeswoman Elizabeth Alexander said in a statement announcing the trip — but withholding most details on security grounds. She said the Obama administration and the Congress will “carefully review U.S. policy toward this region” during the coming months, so this trip “will allow its participants to bring current and firsthand information to these reviews.”

The other members of the bipartisan Senate delegation are also well-traveled colleagues: Sen. John F. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who will soon succeed Biden as foreign relations chairman; and Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Like Reed, both are members of the Armed Services Committee.

Alexander said details of the coming tour — including the countries the senators will visit — will not be released until it is under way. But several Asian news organizations have reported that Biden and the delegation from Capitol Hill will visit Pakistan.

Reed has been to Pakistan several times — often on tours that encompassed Iraq and Afghanistan as well. The Rhode Island Democrat has made 12 wartime tours of Iraq, most recently an internationally publicized visit last July as an informal guide to then-Sen. Barack Obama.

He has also traveled with Biden. In July 2006, the Delaware Democrat joined Reed on a tour of Iraq. Much has changed since that visit, when the two men said they had found that the insurgency in Iraq had given way to what Reed called “a low-grade civil war.” Since President Bush launched the strategic shift known as the “surge” of U.S. combat troops, levels of violence have dramatically declined. Taken together, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — under pressure from terrorists who range across the border to neighboring Pakistan — may constitute the gravest foreign policy challenge facing President-elect Obama. Obama has pledged to remove most U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of his inauguration, while adding troops and diplomatic muscle to the conflict in Afghanistan.

“The fact-finding delegation will make it clear to foreign leaders that they are not there to speak on behalf of the U.S. government, or convey policy positions for the incoming administration,” Alexander said, adding thanks from the senators to the Bush administration “for their cooperation in making this trip possible.”

Biden, Reed and Kerry were all in Newport yesterday for the funeral of former Sen. Claiborne Pell, who died last week at age 90.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com