Carl Levin had some time to kill at the Dubai airport — he’s flying back from a three-day trip with Afghanistan and Pakistan — and so he held a conference call with reporters. His big news was that Gen. William Caldwell, the commander of the Afghan training mission, attributed a big spike in police and army recruitment to President Obama’s July 2011 date for transitioning security responsibilities to the Afghans:

“That had a very positive effect on the Afghan leadership and focused their energies on, for instance, obtaining a larger number of recruits for their army,” Levin said. While he said he didn’t have a total breakdown of the number of recruits, Levin said he was told that there were only 3500 Afghans going through an eight-week basic training course for the security forces in November. That’s up to 11,000 today. While Levin hastened to add that pay has been increased — and the Taliban, it turns out, pays its foot soldiers better than the Afghan government does theirs — Levin said he was “surprised” to hear Caldwell attribute the spike to Obama’s transition date for Afghan security control.

Personally, I asked Levin about his concerns over lopsided Marine-to-Afghan troop ratios in Helmand, which he publicly fretted to McChrystal about in December. To my surprise, Levin said that the ratio is now even, one company of Marines/NATO forces per company of Afghans. He said he couldn’t explain it — the ratio, he said, was three companies of Marines to every Afghan company last month — but he said he was very encouraged by the “major change.” Cooooooooooooooobraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!