A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

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“The country is in a state of slow decline”, says Jennifer Rowell, advocacy coordinator for CARE in Afghanistan, in the New York Times.

The country’s reliance on foreign aid has made the situation dire and as security deteriorates it appears many programs will disappear. Relying on mercenaries to protect civilian work creates a whole range of problematic equations. Here’s the Times:

The management at a company that does aid and development work for the American government knows that some of its employees in Afghanistan are keeping weapons in their rooms — and is choosing to look the other way. At another company in the same business, lawyers are examining whether the company can sue theUnited States Agency for International Development for material breach of contract, citing the deteriorating security in Afghanistan.

An Afghan government plan to abolish private security companies at the end of this month, along with the outbreak of anti-American demonstrations and attacks in the past month, has left the private groups that carry out most of the American-financed development work in Afghanistan scrambling to sort out their operations, imperiling billions of dollars in projects, officials say.

That, in turn, threatens a vital part of the Obama administration’s plans for Afghanistan, which envision a continuing development mission after the end of the NATO combat mission in 2014.

The recent upheaval, set off by the burning of Korans by American military personnel on Feb. 20, cast sudden doubt on nearly every facet of the American presence in Afghanistan, including a long-term strategic partnership deal. On Friday, some progress was made when the United States and Afghanistan reached an agreement for the Afghans to take control of the main coalition prison in six months.

But the fallout on the civilian development side of the mission is having an immediate effect, development workers and experts said. In particular, it is magnifying concerns about the new security arrangements being dictated by the Afghan government, which by March 20 aims to replace the private security companies that now guard aid workers with a hastily raised Afghan force.

Faced with the prospect of sudden change in their security arrangements, with no assurance that the Afghan force can be arranged in time or meet their specific needs, organizations are weighing the future of their operations in the country.

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Through U.S.A.I.D., the American government contracts billions of dollars in projects to private companies based in the United States. The companies provide for their own security in Afghanistan as required under their contracts with the agency.

Until now, that has meant hiring private security companies, which in most cases provide expatriate managers — usually former American or British soldiers — to oversee Afghan guards. Private security companies also provide security for embassies and the United Nations, all of which are being allowed to keep their existing security arrangements.

The expatriate and Afghan guards, armed with handguns and assault rifles, have long been a fixture on the streets of Kabul, and President Hamid Karzai has railed against their presence as an affront to Afghan dignity and a threat to law and order for almost as long. In 2010, he abruptly ordered the security companies disbanded and replaced by a new force that he said the Afghan government would raise.

The plan that has since taken shape calls for private Afghan guards to become part of the new force, known as the Afghan Public Protection Force, which will be responsible for guarding everything from aid projects to NATO supply convoys.

The force has already trained 8,000 new guards, said Siddiq Siddiqi, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. He carries his own sidearm for protection.

The roughly 11,000 Afghan guards working for the 45 private security companies operating in Afghanistan will be subsumed into the force this month, he said. They will then be sent back to the same places they worked before, and the companies that had formerly paid a private security company for the guards would instead pay the Interior Ministry to cover their salaries, plus a 20 percent fee for overhead and to provide a profit — in itself, a useful arrangement for the financially strained government.

While some in the corporate media, such as this article in the LA Times, question how the US has any idea about Iran’s actual nuclear program, the bigger question is how journalists report the information given by military and government sources. Do they become, like in Iraq in 2002 and 2003, propagandists for war?

The New York Times’ Public Editor asks some questions (which virtually no other MSM outlets are doing) even though I personally disagree with his findings (being far too soft on his superiors over war-mongering):

“We talk about generals fighting the last war,” said Tim McNulty, who served as foreign editor for The Chicago Tribune during the Iraq war. “I think journalists also do.”

Nine years after the start of the Iraq war, the scene has shifted to Iran, and Mr. McNulty has a more detached view of events, as co-director of the National Security Journalism Initiative at Northwestern University. Now he cautions journalists against falling again for a kind of siren song: “the narrative of war.”

“The narrative of war, or anticipating war, is a much stronger narrative than the doubters have,” he said. “It is an easier story to write than the question of, well, is it really necessary?”

In recent months I have heard from many readers concerned that The New York Times is falling for this siren song, the narrative of war, in its coverage of Iran’s nuclear program. Not infrequently, readers and critics invoke Judith Miller’s now-discredited coverage in The Times of Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, as if to say it is all happening again.

Among the criticisms are that The Times has given too much space to Israeli proponents of an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities; has failed to mention often enough that Israel itself has nuclear arms; has sometimes overstated the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency; has repeated the questionable assertion that Iran’s leaders seek the eradication of Israel; has failed to analyze the Iranian supreme leader’s statement that nuclear weapons are a “sin”; and has published misleading headlines.

William O. Beeman, author of “The ‘Great Satan’ vs. the ‘Mad Mullahs’: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other,” told me he believes The Times’s coverage has contributed to a dangerous public misunderstanding of the situation.

“The conventional wisdom with regard to Iran is that Iran has a nuclear weapons program and that they are going to attack Israel and going to attack the United States,” said Mr. Beeman, who is chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Minnesota. “But all these things are tendentious and highly questionable.”

Mr. Beeman faulted The Times for mischaracterizing I.A.E.A. reports and for a “disconnect between headline and the actual material in the stories that really affects public opinion,” saying these problems raised a question about the “civic responsibility of The Times.”

This bill of particulars against The Times’s coverage weighs heavily, but it is clear to me that this is not a replay of the Judith Miller episode. I do find examples that support the complaints mentioned above, but also see a pattern of coverage that gives due credence to the counternarrative — not of war but of uncertainty and caution.

Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times, told me the paper is “certainly mindful that some readers may see an echo of the paper’s flawed coverage of Iraq,” but she also noted distinct differences. This time, she said, the United States government is expressing doubts about weapons of mass destruction, not leading the drumbeat for war. And there is no question that Iran has a nuclear program; it’s just unclear whether it is for civilian or military use.

Times journalists “are mindful of our responsibility to be vigilant, skeptical and fair,” she said. “Last month, when the calls for striking Iran began to grow louder, we brought together the foreign and Washington desks and came up with a run of stories designed to examine closely the statements made by those on both sides of the argument, especially the rising calls for a military strike.”

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Hooman Majd, an Iranian-American journalist who spent much of 2011 in Iran, observed that news coverage has left Americans with a caricatured understanding not only of Iran’s leaders but of its people “as being completely oppressed or completely lunatic.”

“Neither is accurate,” said Mr. Majd, author of “The Ayatollah Begs to Differ” and “The Ayatollahs’ Democracy.”

What is needed from The Times, he added, is more effort not only to get ordinary Iranian voices into the coverage but also to reach across the cultural divide to fully understand significant statements from the Iranian leadership, like the fatwa against nuclear weapons by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader.

I share this view and believe the West’s inability to understand the other side’s leadership may have a parallel with the run-up to the Iraq war. Once again, the stakes are high for all involved, including The Times, which has an opportunity to get it right this time.