MORE GOOD NEWS FROM AFGHANISTAN, from the BBC’s John Simpson:

Under the Taliban, you used to be awakened just before dawn by the howling of wild dogs. Today it’s the racket of bulldozers. Kabul is undergoing a building boom, and in a city mostly composed of single-storey, flat-roof buildings it really shows.

Three years after the Taliban were chased out, Kabul has returned to the real world. The streets are jammed with cars, the shops are full of goods. Last year Afghanistan’s economy grew by 30 per cent. The weirdest thing about Kabul under the Taliban used to be its unnatural silence. Now it’s as noisy as anywhere on earth.

I thought it was supposed to be a hopeless quagmire. . . .

UPDATE: Historical perspective. Heh.