Three early but positive signs that things may get better in the Middle East.

[Uncle Joe]

20. Afghanistan's new leadership gives me hope as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashraf_Ghani

He is the co-founder of the Institute for State Effectiveness, an organization set up in 2005 to improve the ability of states to serve their citizens. In 2005 he gave a TED talk, in which he discussed how to rebuild a broken state such as Afghanistan.[1] Ghani is a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, an independent initiative hosted by the United Nations Development Programme. In 2013 he was ranked second in an online poll to name the world's top 100 intellectuals conducted by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines,[2] ranking just behind Richard Dawkins. He previously was named in the same poll in 2010.[3]

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When the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) communist party came to power in 1978, most of the male members of his family were imprisoned and Ghani was stranded in the United States. He stayed at Columbia University and earned his PhD in Cultural Anthropology. He was invited to teach at University of California, Berkeley in 1983, and then at Johns Hopkins University from 1983 to 1991. During this period he became a frequent commentator on the BBC Farsi/Persian and Pashto services, broadcast in Afghanistan. He has also attended the Harvard-INSEAD and World Bank-Stanford Graduate School of Business's leadership training program. He served on the faculty of Kabul University (1973–77), Aarhus University in Denmark (1977), University of California, Berkeley (1983), and Johns Hopkins University (1983–1991). His academic research was on state-building and social transformation. In 1985 he completed a year of fieldwork researching Pakistani Madrasas as a Fulbright Scholar. He also studied comparative religion.

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After leaving Kabul University, Ghani co-founded the Institute for State Effectiveness with Clare Lockhart, of which he is Chairman. The Institute put forward a framework proposing that the state should perform ten functions in order to serve its citizens. This framework was discussed by leaders and managers of post-conflict transitions at a meeting sponsored by the UN and World Bank in September 2005. The program proposed that double compacts between the international community, government and the population of a country could be used as a basis for organizing aid and other interventions, and that an annual sovereignty index to measure state effectiveness be compiled.

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Ghani was recognized as the best finance minister of Asia in 2003 by Emerging Markets. He carried extensive reforms, including issuing a new currency, computerizing treasury operations, instituting a single treasury account, adopting a policy of balanced budgets and using budgets as the central policy instrument, centralizing revenue collection, tariff reform and overhauling customs. He instituted regular reporting to the cabinet the public and international stakeholders as a tool of transparency and accountability, and required donors to focus their interventions on three sectors, improving accountability with government counterparts and preparing a development strategy that held Afghans more accountable for their own future development.

On March 31, 2004, he presented a seven-year program of public investment called Securing Afghanistan’s Future[6] to an international conference in Berlin attended by 65 finance and foreign ministers. Described as the most comprehensive program ever prepared and presented by a poor country to the international community, Securing Afghanistan’s Future was prepared by a team of 100 experts working under a committee chaired by Ghani. The concept of a double-compact, between the donors and the government of Afghanistan on the one hand and between the government and people of Afghanistan on the other, underpinned the investment program. The donors pledged $8.2 billion at the conference for the first three years of the program—the exact amount requested by the government—and agreed that the government’s request for a total seven-year package of assistance of $27.5 billion was justified.

Ghani seems imminently more qualified for the job than his predecessor, he's an intellectual that understands exactly what Afghanistan needs to rebuild, that's his calling.

I believe he's the man for the times.

Having said that it will be critical for him and Abdullah Abdullah to mesh together effectively.