How many times do we 'kill' our casualties in Afghanistan?

Last Friday, the 100th British soldier this year from the Helmand theatre of war was buried with full military honours at St Mary's Lowe House Church in St Helens, Merseyside.

Christopher Davies was a 22-year-old Irish Guardsman killed in a Taliban ambush in Helmand Province on 17 November.

He's now a poignant statistic in the increasingly unpopular Western war against the Taliban insurgency.

Yet his death - and that of fellow soldiers - may be reported up to five separate times each, leading to public perceptions of the casualty list being bigger than the reality thanks to the 'media multiplication effect'.

There have been 345 fatalities among the British military in Afghanistan since 1991; but it seems much more - simply because of the way the Ministry of Defence and the British media report them.

- Step one: soldier or soldiers die in the theatre of war. The MoD announces the fact and their regiments, but no names.

- The day after that, or soon after, once the next of kin have been told, step two: a name is announced and released to the media. The death is reported again.

- Step three: the body is flown home to RAF Brize Norton, passes through the crowds at nearby Wootton Bassett (above), on the way to the mortuary at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. That trip is often covered by the local and national media.

- Step four: if the Oxford coroner decides on an inquest, that can garner coverage too.

- Finally, especially in the regional and local media, the soldier's funeral is reported, as Chris Davies' in St Helens was last Friday.

The Daily Mirror (left) told us how Davies' six-year-old daughter, Lucy, had a teddy bear in her hands, tears in her eyes and a T-shirt with the words 'My Daddy is a Hero' on it.

His coffin was draped in the Union Jack with his cap and service medals on top. Davies' platoon commander, Captain Sam O'Gorman, called him "a man to be proud of".

One death in Helmand: up to five different pieces of media coverage, five public perceptions of another dead British soldier

That is how those 345 deaths can easily seem to be 1,500 or more - making the casualty list in Afghanistan seem higher than it is. 

A 24/7 news environment multiplies the effect. But both the MoD and the British media are responsible.

Is there not a better way to tell the truth about the number of military deaths among our 9,000 troops in Afghanistan?

In the Times last month, Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Fry expressed reservations about public attitudes to the death of members of the Armed Forces. He said he wanted to avoid "the Diana, Graceland stuff". In the same piece, Professor Michael Clarke of the Royal United Services Institute complained that we live in "an age of recreational grief", and said that what happens in Wootton Bassett is "well meant, but not altogether helpful to the Forces". 

It may be that the MoD agrees: if last Sunday's People is to be believed, the Wootton Bassett ritual is to be ended.

That would leave just four separate reports of the same death.   

John Mair edited (with Richard Keeble) Afghanistan, War, Terror and the Media: Deadlines and Frontlines just published by Abramis. He teaches journalism at Coventry University. 

'Ground truth' is a term used by soldiers. It means what is really happening in a situation, rather than how it is perceived from afar. It is, aptly, the title of Patrick Bishop's book about 3 Para's redeployment to Afghanistan in 2008.

I bought a copy as holiday reading back in February. Since then, whenever Afghanistan is mentioned in the news, I am reminded of the interviews with the soldiers of 16 Air Assault Brigade on which the account is based.

This week's conference in Afghanistan, David Cameron's meeting in Washington with President Obama and the announcement that troops could start pulling out early next year brought it all back.

I wonder when anyone will bother to ask the solders what they think, because journalists rarely do.

Patrick Bishop (and BBC Newsnight's Mark Urban) are exceptions. Thanks to their journalism, the views and experiences of the rank and file are starting to be aired. But they are in a minority.

Why is this? Could it be a matter of secrecy?

Unlikely, since the soldiers who contributed to Bishop's book appear to have done so candidly and freely. Some names were changed or omitted to protect operational security, but it seems Bishop went about his journalism pretty much unfettered.

Ground Truth reminds us that the British Army is a professional organisation. The men and women who are in it choose to be there. They are intelligent individuals whose views deserve to be heard.

Moreover, they are in Afghanistan on a mission. The conditions are arduous. They risk death and serious injury daily, but they are there to do a job and they want to get it done.

At the start of the deployment to Afghanistan, it was all about fighting. Units such as 3 Para were good at that and found it rewarding. But the fighting had a purpose: it was - and still is  - necessary to restore stability and allow reconstruction to take place. Bishop writes:

"They were prepared to endure the risk because most of them had faith in the value of the mission.

They believed that fighting a war thousands of miles from home brought a greater measure of security to their family and friends back in Britain. 'If what I'm doing reduces the number of heroin overdoses in the world then it has to be worth it without a doubt,' said one sergeant."

The mistake many journalists make is that, as civilians writing for a civilian audience, they miss the 'ground truth'. As Bishop puts it:

"Seen through civilian eyes the Afghanistan mission seems daunting, uninspiring, thankless. Soldiers see it differently. The daunting, the uninspiring and the thankless, they say, is 'what we do'."

'Thankless' manifests itself in various ways if you're a soldier in Afghanistan.

You are up against more than the insurgency. You face the "cynicism and venality of the Karzai administration". You know that, while you grapple with the tentacles of the beast, "the brain and vital organs [lie] in Pakistan ... across the border and beyond British control".

When you have an achievement to celebrate, this too is under-reported. Take the installation of a turbine at the Kajaki dam hydroelectric power station. This operation involved delivering more than 200 tonnes of components across 100km of rocky track through the Sangin valley. The convoy was menaced by roadside bombs and came under direct - and indirect - fire.

The generator had to be encased in armour plate before they set off. Even so, one direct hit from a rocket would have rendered it useless.

The closer they got to their destination, the more intense the resistance became. But they did it and the turbine now produces electricity for an estimated 1.8 million Afghans.

How much coverage did this success attract?

Hardly any, because, among other things, it was overshadowed by the row at Westminster over helicopters. On the day, this was deemed more newsworthy than one of the biggest feats of logistics undertaken by the British Army.

Did editors assume that the Kajaki dam convoy was less interesting? Did they think its significance would be too difficult for their audiences/readership to appreciate? Were there simply no decent pictures? Was it just bad luck?

Perhaps their priorities betray the trap Bishop says civilians fall into when they report Afghanistan:

"The truth that civilians overlooked on the occasions when they thought about what the Army was doing in Afghanistan," he maintains, "was that the soldiers were pursuing their own personal goals as hard as they were any task set for them by politicians ...

... Most of the soldiers seemed to believe the overall strategy was the right one and their struggle and sacrifices were worthwhile. The main frustration was that there were not enough of them to do their job effectively."

The final word goes to a Territorial Army reservist who had put his career as a lawyer in Edinburgh on hold to go to Afghanistan as a platoon commander. He told Patrick Bishop he felt "frustrated when I hear people say we support the troops but we don't support the war ... I think that just undermines the efforts of the blokes and I think it's contradictory."

Patrick Bishop began his career covering the British re-capture of the Falklands in 1982 and has reported from the frontline of most subsequent conflicts, mainly for the Daily Telegraph. He was the newspaper's correspondent in the Middle East and Paris and served as its foreign editor from 1995 to 1997.

The effect of the latest edition of Rolling Stone magazine on the career of General Stanley McChrystal has been swift and drastic. His Commander-in-Chief removed him unceremoniously from his role as leader of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The Rolling Stone feature wasn't a scoop in the traditional sense of the revealing of secrets: its revelations were of opinion and attitude, recorded by a journalist who was there with permission. But its consequence is a supreme example of red-blooded journalismo. Rolling Stone has claimed a huge scalp. Nobody will ever kick sand in the face of its reporters.  

Readers of the piece, by the war correspondent Michael Hastings, might not have initially realised what a powerful punch it packed. Hastings reveals that McChrystal's favourite beer is Bud Light Lime, and his favourite film is Tallageda Nights.

The feature was based, Hastings says, on his spending a month "around the general". There is no mention of the terms on which he was allowed access. 

Hastings had "several lengthy interviews" with McChrystal, but there are surprisingly few quotes from him. What must have raised blood pressure in Washington were paragraphs like the following, about Richard Holbrooke, President Obama's Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan:

At one point on his trip to Paris, McChrystal checks his BlackBerry. "Oh, not another email from Holbrooke," he groans. "I don't even want to open it." He clicks on the message and reads the salutation out loud, then stuffs the BlackBerry back in his pocket, not bothering to conceal his annoyance.

"Make sure you don't get any of that on your leg," an aide jokes, referring to the email.

But the idea that Rolling Stone followed McChrystal around and that his off-guard comments got him sacked is simplistic.  

First, it is members of the general's inner circle, whom Hastings characterises as "a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs", who supply the killer quotes, rather than the general himself. 

And the quotes are mostly unattributed, except to "an adviser to McChrystal", "sources familiar with the meeting", "one aide ... another aide", "a member of the general's team", "a senior adviser to McChrystal".

At the end of a boozy night in Paris, McChrystal tells Hastings his team would die for him, as he would for them, a thought that acquires a new irony if it was their comments that led to his downfall.

But the most disturbing reading for members of the Obama administration may have been the contradictions Hastings exposes in McChrystal's expensive and ambitious strategy of counter-insurgency - the attempt to fight the Taliban by winning over the Afghan population.

While McChrystal's gung-ho, rule-bending style has been much reported, his soldiers say his hardline policies to minimise civilian casualties - because of their impact on local public opinion - are making their jobs impossible. Here the piece persuasively stacks up testimony against McChrystal:

"Bottom line?" says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers' lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing."

Hastings attends a meeting with front-line troops who tell their commander how he is hampering their ability to root out the enemy:  

The session ends with no clapping, and no real resolution. McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of his own men aren't buying it.

And the following bleak vision of the end of US involvement in Afghanistan must surely have been greeted with an 'ouch!' in the Pentagon:

"It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win," says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal.

Hastings paints a picture of a commander torn between the demands of his own forces, his NATO allies, the Afghan government, the local population and his political masters in Washington. It's a thoughtful, thorough essay, setting out in detail a huge foreign policy problem.

So why exactly did McChrystal have to go? 

The President said "the conduct represented in the recently published article ... undermines the civilian control of the military that's at the core of our democratic system".

But how exactly? The President ruled out the two most obvious reasons for his action: "I don't make this decision based on any difference in policy with General McChrystal ... nor do I make this decision out of any sense of personal insult."

The idea of personal conflict in the corridors of power is easy. Perhaps there was a more complicated reason for McChrystal's fall. 

When the first political memoirs of the Obama administration are published, we will find out at what level Hastings' piece really hit home, or whether it was just the catalyst for a process that was already under way.