There are a few exceptions:
James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, Opinion Journal, July 9:
Good News From Afghanistan
You hear a lot of complaints from foes of the Bush administration to the effect that it's outrageous that in the three months since Saddam Hussein's fall, America has failed to transform Iraq into Norway. Now and again they also complain about Afghanistan, which hasn't even been transformed into Canada (which Reuters reports ranks a pitiful eighth on the U.N. quality-of-life index).
These criticisms are unrealistic; nation building takes time. A report in USA Today notes that things are in fact getting better in Afghanistan. A reporter visits Istalif, a "mountainside village 90 minutes north of Kabul":
Come on a warm, sunny Friday, the Muslim holy day. Stop at a picnic area in a wooded plateau with a commanding view of the Shomali Plain. Chances are, men such as Haji Zahir Kargar, 50, will be there with friends and family who also have driven up from Kabul.
"Often on Fridays now, we are coming here for picnics," Kargar, a clerk, says through an interpreter. "During the Taliban years? No!" Such entertainment was banned by the fundamentalist militia. . . .
It takes an Afghan, someone who knows that this country was one of the world's poorest and least-developed even before it was devastated by two decades of fighting, to see a picnic as a sign of something larger.
The paper quotes 50-year-old Abdul Qadeer: "I'm optimistic about the future of Afghanistan. Before, Afghanistan was gone. Now it is back."
Thanks to the US armed forces.