Roger Cohen went to Afghanistan and he wrote a series of articles about it for the International Herald Tribune.
The first paragraph of today’s article goes like this: “Afghanistan is not Iraq. That's the good news. Decades of war are devastating, but they are not as crippling as decades of Saddam Hussein's totalitarian hell. The glint of initiative outweighs fear's residue in Afghan eyes. Therein lies hope.” Cohen seems to be moderately optimistic.
I’m moderately pessimistic – see also my article that will appear tomorrow in the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad.
At the end it all depends on the question what you want to achieve.
On the picture: my friend Niels.