Good News from Afghanistan

Included in a helpful update on the battle for Afghanistan at Strategy Page was this interesting datum:

Meanwhile, the country, overall, prospers. GDP grew over 20 percent this year. Inflation has been reduced (from 9 to 3 percent) in the last two years. All this is a new experience for Afghanistan, which has for centuries been too chaotic to generate much sustained economic growth. The occasional violence in the south makes the news, but the economic growth is what most Afghans pay attention to. The violence has been around here forever, the prosperity is something new.

Who'd have thought it? We keep hearing reports suggesting that we're bogged down in an unwinnable war, but whenever there's an actual analysis of what's happening there the news is often much less gloomy than we'd been led to believe it was.