If we start counting from Jan 4, 2004, when insurgents burned 20 schools in Narathiwat and stole more than 400 guns from a military camp in the province, the violence in the deep South has been going on for nearly nine years .
If we start counting from Sept 19, 2006, when Sonthi Boonyaratglin rolled out a dozen or so tanks and seized administrative power from then prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, it has been almost six years since Thailand was plunged head-first into a political maze from which it has not yet found a way out.
Is it about time the country pulled itself together and did something about these issues?
Or should we give up and assume that these protracted problems will either run their own course and lose steam or one day explode in a big enough bang that someone will have to pay attention to them?
Had Thailand been isolated, we could probably have taken our time in working out the southern security or political issues, maybe over the course of a few generations.
But, of course, we are not. As the country gets bogged down by these internal problems, other countries and peoples have moved on. It may not be such a worry at this point, but in a few years' time, Thailand could really fall behind our neighbours if we do not make an effort to improve our skills and our competitive advantage. By that time, it could be very difficult to catch up.
For me, it's not too worrying that Thailand will lose its laurel as the world's top rice exporter after nearly 50 years in the top spot. The country is slipping to third place behind India and Vietnam.
What should be of more concern is we have not been able to improve on our productivity. Our rice yield per rai has stayed at about 448kg, which puts us at the rank of seventh in the 10-nation Asean group. Vietnam, at the very top, can produce almost twice the amount of rice from the same amount of land, at 862kg per rai.
We can try to compete based on the quality of our rice or we can go organic and charge a premium. But how long can we last if we do not take a serious look at what we are doing and try harder and invest more so we can do it better?
With the country's political leadership being all-consumed in the game of power _ rewriting the charter or slandering their political opponents on a daily basis _ it's difficult to think about who will bother with the difficult issue of telling farmers to adapt themselves and produce their rice more efficiently.
Let's go back to the southern unrest. Over the past nearly nine years, the Deep South Watch, an independent organisation monitoring the situation, has recorded 11,754 incidents of violence, or about 3.5 a day. More than 5,000 people _ both Buddhists and Muslims _ have been murdered, and more than 9,000 injured. The country has spent more than 180 billion baht battling the insurgency.
The gravity of the situation is indisputable. The latest ambush by militants, which killed four soldiers in Pattani on Saturday morning, is but a grim reminder of how deadly things are in the strife-torn region. But when we look at the army and ministry of defence, what do we see? We see Minister Sukumpol Suwanatat spent weeks _ well, not him exactly but people in the Defence Ministry whose time and energy could have been better deployed somewhere else _ digging into the ministry's dust-filled archives, searching for old, crumbling records that could have proved that it's too late to convict opposition leader Abhisit Vejjajiva of draft-dodging.
Mr Sukumpol can argue until he is red, or blue, in the face that he is not doing all the hard work of sending his people into the dungeon and digging up old documents that will prove nothing and convict no one for political purposes. His actions, however, speak louder than words. And if the man at the top of the country's defence and security affairs is spending his resources and his precious time in pursuit of an expired draft-dodging charge, what do you reckon his rank and file will think? Will they want to take on difficult, even deadly issues that require their sacrifice and dedication?
What else has the minister busied himself with? Trying to defend the integrity of a so-called bomb detector that has been proven the world over to be no more than a dowsing rod?
Thailand has to stop counting the years in which it has been mired in internal political fighting or the southern insurgency and start to put into action tangible steps to get past them. Otherwise, we will be looking back to a decade that was lost completely.
Atiya Achakulwisut is Deputy Editor, Bangkok Post.