Are we winning yet?

Afghanistan, 2011.

Every morning, (early every morning) I go into an operations room.  I am supposed to be getting an update on everything that has happened in the seemingly fleeting moments that I have been asleep - and you would be surprised how much can happen in that very short period when I am snoring.  I like to start bright and breezy, so I usually ask "Are we winning yet?"  Now, I may mean it in an ironic, kind of sarcastic, maybe funny way and it usually gets a little laugh (we are easily pleased).  The Battle Captain (the guy or girl who is overseeing things) then usually launches into a brief designed to tell me as much as possible in as short a time as possible.  I pretend to understand everything they have told me, then I go and confidently tell a whole other bunch of other guys, most of what I have just been told (or at least my interpretation of it).  They in turn go and repeat it to other people and so it goes on.  I know its nearly time to go to bed when I go to a brief and someone tells me all the things I started telling people at the start of the day.   (Probably the subject for another email).

Anyway, back to the war (or the insurgency as it is formally known - again, probably the subject of another email.  The insurgency formerly known as the war?).  So I am asking the question.  No one actually answers though.  Who decides?  On what criteria?  Every day I report to someone on the number of dead and wounded.  Ours and theirs.  The list goes a little like this...

? x US/UK/ISAF (delete as applicable) KIA.

? x UK WIA,

? x ANSF (AFG National Security Forces) KIA or WIA

? x LN (Local nationals) K or W

? x INS (Insurgents) KIA or WIA

? x Detainees

I am not going to comment here on the priority or importance attached to each category (another email perhaps?) Lets focus a little. So how do we win? Is it just a battle of attrition, ie, we kill more of them than they kill of us.  That's simple. 

1 x US KIA vs 16 x INS KIA = ISAF win.  Yes? No? 

Where do the 15 x LN dead enter the equation?  Or the children, who, to punish their parents have had their hands and/or feet placed in boiling water? 

If we place so much concrete and so many barricades around a police headquarters that the INS attack a bank instead, killing LNs instead of ANSF have we won?

There is a programme here designed to take weapons off people.  So when we have disarmed the population have we won?  I doubt it, because we are also running a programme to arm the population.  Seriously.  I'm not making it up.

In a country where people trade suicide bombers like baseball cards, where people sell their own children to be used as suicide bombers and where police chiefs release known INS becuase they are of the same tribe can we ever win?

Does it matter whether we win or not.  Probably not, because in 2015 we are all going home.  I am pretty sure that when we go, the politicians will declare a victory.  NATO will have enabled the Afghans to be masters of their own destiny.  The politicians will claim we have trained, enabled and handed over a competent, professional police, judiciary, military.  We will have enabled good governance and the spread of the rule of law.  I am not sure it's all true.  All I know for sure is that when we do go home we will leave behind more concrete and fewer people.