On September 7, 2004, those who should have been in the know sat down in Washington and tried to work out if the US was winning in Iraq. Stephen Hadley, later the President's National Security adviser, told the small meeting ''we need a framework ... to determine if we are winning or losing''. Perhaps the moral is that if you need to ask, you know something's going wrong. Peace offers its own shining beacons of hope; there's no need to attempt to measure progress when things are going OK. But when organisations offer up crumbs of comfort small nuggets that demonstrate success, without considering the broader picture that's when we should at once be suspicious that the goal is not being achieved, and that the end is no closer than it was in the beginning.
The Chief of the Defence Force, Angus Houston, is well aware of this, and that may be one reason he's always refrained from attempting to condense victory in Afghanistan into a slippery, tight bunch of numerical figures. Back in Iraq, the Americans eventually came up with a number that they wanted to watch: the number of local soldiers and police that were being trained and deployed each month. They reasoned if the local forces were taking a greater degree of responsibility for enforcing security, then the country must be becoming more peaceful. Any trend figures suggesting that the number of assassinations were increasing, or that there were more car bombings could be dismissed as simply a ''last ditch effort'' to prolong the insurgency. The problem was that, in the words of a senior US general, the extra Iraqi forces were worth ''diddley-squat''.
The Americans were measuring the wrong figures. The metrics did tell a story, but it wasn't one that was politically acceptable. The failure of the US command to recognise this meant they persisted with tactics that were bound to end in defeat. Although, eventually, a change of command and recognition of the need to do things a different way led to a sort of success, by then the American people had grown sour about George Bush's story of victory. They realised winning meant more than a parade on an aircraft carrier.
This is why it's worth attempting to work out if we're ''winning'' in Afghanistan. Looking at the hard numbers and seeing if we can extrapolate a story from them. But firstly, it's worth noting that security in the Afghan capital has collapsed. It was still possible to wander freely in Kabul after the Taliban were ousted, something that is now apparently impossible unless you have a death wish, good local contacts, or your own private (and heavily armed) security detail.
The number that's of biggest concern should be the production of opium. That's not just because some of the dope may eventually end up on the streets back here.
The prevalence of poppy cultivation demonstrates that a functioning, legal, economy hasn't been able to resurrect itself since the departure of the Taliban. They were completely opposed to the drug, and had virtually wiped out production. Today, Afghanistan is back as the main producer of opium, having once more regained its laurels from Burma. The United Nations says that there has been more of the narcotic produced in the past growing season than there was in the entire time when the Taliban were in power in Kabul. And where does most of it come from? Why, from the South, of course, where our soldiers are helping the Dutch. At least the price of opium (although not the finished drug) on the open market has halved over the past five years. Perhaps we're managing to flood the market, although it's a funny way to destroy the illegal trade.
The trouble is they're caught in a Catch-22. Destroy the poppies and you eliminate the one source of income for the farmers. But the Taliban manage to tax the illegal production anyway, to cream off the profit and turn it into weapons to continue fighting the war. After nearly eight years of occupation, drug production is burgeoning.
It's been difficult to get stories out about what's really happening on the ground in the areas where our forces are deployed. Even when journalists manage to get into the country, they're often confined to base areas, and so the only news that gets back is about how bad the food is that our boys have to put up with in the mess. But Defence Media appears to be changing its attitude, because recently a journalist with the ABC's international service, Australia Network, was allowed to travel with a patrol of newly trained local forces but the results were equivocal. The Afghan forces fought hard, but they retired each night leaving the insurgents in control of the village. None of the Australian-trained troops died, but they didn't find any of the enemy had been killed, either. At best the mission demonstrated the Taliban are being challenged, but we just don't know enough to be confident about anything more than that.
So what are the numbers that we should be focusing on? Nine senior insurgent leaders were killed last year, and another four have been killed this year. Unfortunately, more immediately take their place. Perhaps understandably, the military won't provide any details of the number of payments made for accidental killings. The insurgents are well armed. One operation found a cache of 20 machine guns and a number of rocket-propelled grenade launchers - but unfortunately more are always flowing into the country. Although 37 anti-drug operations have been carried out, it appears our Diggers weren't involved in any of them. We're mentoring an Afghan army unit, but it won't be fully effective until next year. The army says one of the few signs of progress is that there are now eight million mobile phones in the country, up from zero in 2001. Unfortunately, these can be used to detonate improvised explosive devices, the very things that are killing large numbers of Coalition forces and Afghan civilians.
Are we winning? The answer is: probably not.
Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra writer. nicstuart@hotmail.com
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