So that was a plus. Faryab…not so much of a plus.

In my weekly “5 Things I Learned on My Really Long Afghanistan Vacation” post, I mentioned that I’d be going into more detail how ISAF needs to accept some of the blame for what happened in Faryab recently. This … is part of the reason: being disconnected from the realities of this place means that we’ll never truly know how the war is going. But I’m pretty sure it’s not going as well as Upton says it is.

In Foreign Policy recently, Lt. Col. Stewart Upton, Public Affairs Officer for the USMC in Regional Command Southwest in Helmand, made the case that we’re actually winning in Afghanistan, and the reason that some rational observers think otherwise is because the media insists on reporting the bad news, and not reporting enough of the successes here in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the Taliban, despite Upton’s assertions to the contrary, isn’t as active as he’d hoped in cyberspace, and didn’t get the memo. At least not in Trek Nawa. If you’ve never heard of Trek Nawa, you’re not alone.