A Metric of Difficulty

I came across this statistic yesterday and was intrigued/unsettled.

Infant mortality rate: rank/@ birth (UN/CIA)/under five

Iraq: 169/(81.5/43.8)/105.4
Afganistan: 194/(157.0/151)/235.4

Afganistan is second to last of all countries in the UN list of infant mortalities per 1000 live births. The CIA puts Afganistan third to last at 222nd of 224. A kid has a 1/10 chance of dying in Iraq before the age of five, but more than double that in Afganistan! That should give some sense of the level of civic development in the country and (through some unspecified logic) the likelihood of political stability there.