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When is a war a winnable one? That, it seems, can depend on your perception.
Nato, apparently, remains confident that the Western intervention in Afghanistan, short on international attention and resources since the focus turned to Iraq in 2003, can still reach a positive conclusion.
Addressing a seminar today at the Chatham House think tank in London, Jamie Shea, director of policy planning in office of Nato secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, insisted progress was being made.
"Above all, we have recognised that this is a mission that is eminently do-able," said the now white-haired Englishmen, best known for his role as chief press officer and public face of Nato during various the Balkan crises.
Success would depend on improved cooperation between nations and other organisations, and could take as long as a decade, he warned, noting: "The business of state-building is a work in progress."
His cautiously optimistic view of a sustained, global effort to stablise the Afghan state, crack down on the drugs trade and gradually train a new force of domestic police officers was far too rosy for some of the academics, policy experts and journalists listening.
One BBC reporter with experience of present day Afghanistan called Mr Shea's version "absolutely extraordinary", saying: "I couldn't recognise the country from how you described it."
But while there was someone willing to talk up the Afghan campaign, the view on Iraq, the other main subject of the morning's talk, could be summed up as such: we're all doomed.
And this, it should be remembered, was no student debate but a room full of several hundred sober-suited, overwhelmingly middle aged specialists.
While Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain's ambassador in Washington when the troops first went into Iraq, could describe Afghanistan as "winnable", he made no similar predictions for the other war.
Those who could speak more bluntly did so, with some vehemence.
Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at London University's Queen Mary College and author of several books on the modern Iraqi state spoke of a political vacuum now filled by militia groups.
"The thing to keep in mind is that the Iraqi state does not exist in a meaningful fashion," he said, warning that a rapid US troop withdrawal would make matters even worse.
It would be "morally repugnant to leave 26 million people to descend into hell - a hell that we have created," he said.
When the foreign troops eventually leave, they will leave "a collapsed state with a civil war, in one of the most important geo-political regions in the world".
02:47pm
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