It's always half empty...

The latest U.N. Human Development Index was able to include a ranking on Afghanistan for the first time.

It found that the non-drug economy is growing at 16 percent a year.

Growth is expected to average 10-12 percent a year for the next decade.

More than half of school-age children are enrolled in school.

So what does The New York Timeslead with?

Three years after the United States drove the Taliban out and vowed to rebuild Afghanistan, the war-shattered country ranked 173rd of 178 countries in the U.N. 2004 Human Development Index, according to a new report from the United Nations.

It isn't until paragraph five that the reader reads anything positive about the situation there.

I'm not suggesting a whitewash. Afghanistan has problems in spades. But how about a little balance right off the top? Come on, it's not hard. Maybe something like:

Three years after the United States drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan, the economy is booming and half its children are in school, although the war-shattered country could easily slip back into chaos, according a new United Nations report.

The article also gives no comparative numbers. We are supposed to think that a 25-percent jobless rate is bad, but since we don't know what the rate was before, we can't know for sure.

That applies to the 54 percent of school-age children enrolled in school, too.

Since this is the first year the U.N. has included Afghanistan in its survey, it may be tough to come by comparative figures.

But somebody should have some estimates, no?