Media Miscalculation

Geopolitics: Newspapers are offering maps of Afghanistan published by the UN which shows Taliban attacks on foreign aid workers in different parts of the country over time. The attacks are up everywhere, but especially in the north as Taliban fighters are driven out of Kandahar. The media is saying these maps are proof that NATO is losing in Afghanistan.
To understand why this is not true we must review the history of the Afghan war. For the last eight years NATO has had a policy in Afghanistan called "mowing the lawn." In theory this policy applied just enough force to the Taliban to prevent their numbers from expanding, buying time for America to win in Iraq, at which point an American surge would be initiated in Afghanistan and a true counter-insurgency war would begin and the bad guys would start losing.
The mowing theory did not coincide with practice and during the past eight years the Taliban have gotten stronger because the mowing operations were merely a light trim, not a good solid weed waking. Much of the fault lies with the British Army, but let's set that aside for now. During the mowing the lawn part of the Afghan war foreign aid workers were basically unmolested. Why should they be molested? Much of the aid was flowing straight to the Taliban.
Now America is taking the wood to the bad guys in Kandahar, the Vatican of the Taliban, their holiest and most sacred ground. The jihadist fighters are retreating north and setting up shop in their new digs. Setting up shop means killing local civilians and foreign aid workers. Yesterday I used the term "jihadist retreat/battle lines." The Great Retreat is a strategic retreat: a carefully planned and executed fighting retreat where innocents, good guys, and bad guys are killed.
The low casualties of the mowing the lawn era were an illusion. Now let's really take a step back. Democracies always start out poorly when they fight dictatorships. Democracies always take a long time to ramp up and mount effective offensives. When these offensives finally get under way they always generate high casualties and the good guys always win eventually.

Specific Stocks: I grade the accuracy of my geopolitical forecasts by movement within financial markets, not words from the New York Times editorial page. Yesterday I suggested that ITT has a leg up in creating a Long War surveillance web. Today NASA awarded ITT a huge contract to tie together all its orbiting assets (like the int'l space station and satellites) into a single web. The work ITT will be doing for NASA will help it with similar work with the Pentagon. So I just got a gold star in my forecasting.
Ferro Corporation (FOE) is down about 2% today. I still believe in this stock but would like to point out how I used charts to build my position. FOE is a super volatile high beta stock that screams up and down. I buy it when it dips to the 50-day moving average and finds support. Most of my industrials and materials are so-called growth at a discount stocks (Harsco, Koppers Holding, DuPont, ITT). I take bigger positions in these lower beta stocks than in ones like FOE.