Good News from Baghdad

Instapundit directs us to Outside the Wire, where we discover that the surge is working. Well, kind of. Please read the entire article; lots of great writing and pictures:

Is there hope for Baghdad? Yes. The additional U.S. forces from the surge are already showing limited signs of success. They are not the signs quantified by London or D.C. think tanks.

Every Battalion Commander I talked with gave me the same metrics to measure success--Commerce, people returning to their homes, essential services, kids playing soccer in fields they haven't played on in 2 years, professionalization of the police and security services.

Those are things that do not fit well in an index and things a person can only see on the ground by going back to the same areas of operation every few months.

Which is why I will be back in Dora and West Rasheed in a few months.

As nice as that is to read - and it certainly is nice - the fact remains that progress can also be measured by indexes: levels of violence, kids in school, etc. and all those indicators remain pretty negative. But it is important to remember that the violence isn't the entire story: playgrounds and jobs and electricity all matter as well.