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But so far, the numbers undermine the stark crime wave predictions. In fact, the plunge in the national crime rate has been most evident in areas the housing bust has hit the hardest. Even with California unemployment higher than 12 percent, car thefts declined in Los Angeles by 20 percent last year over 2008. Nationally, both violent crime and property crime declined by about 5 percent between 2008 and 2009 – the height of the recession, according to an FBI report issued Monday.

Government safety nets – including extension of unemployment benefits and a growth in food stamp recipients – may also have helped to keep despair down and crime rates low, criminologists suggest. At the same time, new policing tactics, including the "broken windows" theory, and booming prison populations – currently at 1.6 million, five times the number of people incarcerated in 1977 – have succeeded largely by targeting specific lawbreakers and high-crime locales instead of broader social injustices, some social critics say.

Pakistan’s recent “Rah-e-Nijat” (Path to Salvation) military operation in the South Waziristan agency of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) has achieved tremendous success since it began on October 17. It is believed that security forces should be able to clear the main towns of Taliban presence by early December 2009, when it starts snowing in the region (Daily Times [Lahore], November 1)

The recent successes in Pakistan’s military operation in Swat and South Waziristan testify to the fact that Pakistan has sufficient counter-insurgency capability to dislodge the Taliban from their strongholds in FATA and NWFP. This nullifies the previous assumptions regarding the Pakistani armed forces that they were tailored to fight conventional warfare against regular armies in plains and deserts and lacked the training and ability to conduct CI operations in mountainous terrain against non-state actors.

The public support which the Pakistan Army received from people in the conflict zone as well as from the entire country helped in carrying out the counter-insurgency operations successfully. The popularity of the Taliban – which remained quite high during 2003-2007 – dipped to an all time low. The successful conclusion of the first phase of the counter-insurgency would restore public confidence over the Pakistani armed forces and raise the morale of the security personnel