Goodbye Baghdad, Hello Kabul

As the Obama administration debates whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, a squadron of journalists has already arrived. Many of them are transplants from America’s other overseas war, in Iraq.

Lara Logan, a CBS correspondent, is among the journalists reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Richard Engel of NBC, is also reporting in Kabul as TV networks and newspapers expand their coverage.

“It’s like the Baghdad class of 2003 is now the Kabul class of 2009,” Richard Engel of NBC said by telephone Saturday from Kabul, the Afghanistan capital.

No longer overshadowed by Iraq, the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan, as news outlets had once called it, is suddenly very visible. Television networks have opened small bureaus, and major newspapers have assigned more staff members to the country, and its neighbor to the east, Pakistan. But with the media business under great strain, this war is being covered on a budget.

“Afghanistan has always been the poor man’s war,” Lara Logan of CBS said in an interview; the news media, too, are spending less.

For the first time in years, Afghanistan has “emerged as the top story” for news organizations in the United States, the Project for Excellence in Journalism reported this month.

“I think there’s been an explosion of coverage,” said Renee Montagne, the host of “Morning Edition” on National Public Radio, who spent a month in Afghanistan over the summer.

Much of the current attention is centered on President Obama’s formation of a new American strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. But events inside the country are earning more coverage now, as well.

A recent cover article in Time magazine was headlined “The War Up Close.” The issue featured a photo essay about infantrymen fighting the Afghan insurgency. In a nod to the invisible qualities of the war, Time wrote of the photographs, “If it’s true that sometimes we’ve let ourselves lose sight of Afghanistan, then as a start, let’s look here.”

Like Iraq, Afghanistan poses several vexing problems for journalists. Chief among them is safety: amid deteriorating security in the country and the ever-present threat of kidnapping, news organizations have increased precautions for their staff members in the field.

The security concerns are compounded by the country’s complex political landscape and the famously tough terrain.

“It’s an extremely difficult place to operate out of,” said Tony Maddox, an executive vice president and managing director of CNN International.

One of the other problems is financial. Battered by the recession, some news organizations have made deep cuts to their already small foreign staffs, making it difficult to finance continuing coverage of wars in two theaters. While no one says news organizations are skimping on security measures, it is evident that they are trying to maintain flexible presences in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan was being neglected long before the most recent round of media cutbacks, some journalists say. The main TV networks in the United States almost completely withdrew from Afghanistan as attention shifted to Iraq in 2003. Networks depended on producers in Afghanistan or Pakistan and rarely covered the simmering conflict.

The cable network with the largest international staff, CNN, relied mostly on stringers (a term for local freelance journalists) and visits from foreign correspondents, although Mr. Maddox said “we were in there more than we were out of there.”

The New York Times has based a correspondent in Afghanistan since November 2001. The Times and other newspapers have also maintained local workers in the country. The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post say they now have correspondents assigned to Kabul and Islamabad, Pakistan.

Compared with the bloody situation in Iraq, Afghanistan was a subject that “rarely made news,” said Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which produces a weekly news coverage index.

Using its sample of 55 print, online, television and radio outlets, the project found that in 2007, its first year of media monitoring, Afghanistan represented under 1 percent of all news coverage. In 2008, the 1 percent figure stayed true, “despite the fact that it was the deadliest year ever for the U.S. in Afghanistan,” Mr. Jurkowitz said.

He said that coverage of Afghanistan grew modestly for the first half of 2009, as Mr. Obama deployed more troops and talked about a shift in strategy. A more significant increase happened over the summer as the Afghan presidential election neared and the troop discussions ensued. Now the situation in the country is “consistently among the top stories of the week,” he added.

Iran signals it may not strike nuclear deal

GEORGE JAHN

Associated Press Writer= VIENNA (AP) — Iran signaled ahead of international talks Monday that it will not meet Western demands for a deal that would move most of its enriched uranium out of the country and delay its gaining the ability to make a nuclear bomb.

Tehran says it needs enriched uranium for nuclear fuel, but the West fears it could be used for weapons. The U.S. says Iran is now one to six years away from being able to make such arms, should it choose to.

Tehran's refusal to give up most of its enriched stock could doom both Monday's talks and chances of a second round of broader negotiations between Tehran and six world powers on the Islamic Republic's nuclear program.

Monday's Vienna talks between Tehran and the U.S., Russia and France, focus on a technical issue with huge strategic ramifications — whether Iran is ready to farm out some of its uranium enrichment program to a foreign country.

Progress would strengthen confidence on the part of the U.S. and five other big powers trying to persuade Iran to dispel fears about its nuclear program that this time Tehran is serious about reducing tensions and ready to build on Oct. 1 Geneva talks with six world powers.

Beyond that, it could give the international community more negotiating space by delaying Tehran's ability to turn what is now a civilian uranium enrichment program into an assembly line producing fissile warhead material.

The talks Monday will attempt to implement what Western officials say Iran agreed to during the Geneva talks; letting a foreign country — most likely Russia — turn most of its low-enriched uranium into higher grades to fuel its small research reactor in Tehran.

That would mean turning over more than 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium — more than 2,600 pounds and as much as 75 percent of Iran's declared stockpile. Tentative plans are for further enrichment in Russia and then conversion in France into metal fuel rods for the Tehran reactor.

Iran's state-run Press TV cited unnamed officials in Tehran as saying the Islamic Republic was looking to hold on to its low-enriched uranium and buying what it needed for the Tehran reactor abroad.

Such a stance would likely doom the talks, with neither the U.S. or France accepting such terms.

Iranian agreement to such terms would be significant because 1,000 kilograms is the commonly accepted threshold of the amount of low-enriched uranium needed for production of weapons-grade uranium enriched to levels above 90 percent.

Based on the present Iranian stockpile, the U.S. has estimated that Tehran could produce a nuclear weapon between 2010 and 2015, an assessment that broadly jibes with those from Israel and other nations tracking Tehran's nuclear program.

If most of Iran's declared stock is taken out of the country, further enriched abroad and then turned into fuel for the Tehran reactor, any effort to make nuclear weapons would be delayed until Iran again has enriched enough material to turn into weapons-grade uranium.

"It buys some time," said David Albright of the Washington-based IISS, which has closely tracked Iran for signs of any covert proliferation. But Albright added that Iran could replace even 1,200 kilograms of low-enriched uranium "in little over a year" at its present rate of enrichment.

And ahead of the talks it remained unclear whether Iran was even ready to discuss shipping out most of its enriched stock.

A senior Western diplomat in Vienna who is familiar with Monday's talks told The Associated Press shortly before they were to begin that the Iranians had not communicated any refusal to discuss transferring their enriched uranium to the delegations involved in the negotiations.

Even if Tehran agrees, it could still try to resist pressure to hand over most of its stock in one batch, insisting instead on sending small amounts out of the country. Iran still has enough fuel for the Tehran reactor to last until mid-2011.

With more than 4,000 centrifuges now producing low-enriched uranium, and its capacities increasing, that could leave Tehran in a position to rapidly make up for amounts exported to again amass enough material to make one nuclear weapon.

The six powers — the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — have tentatively scheduled follow-up talks to the Geneva meeting by the end of this month aimed at starting negotiations that will ultimately place strict controls on Iran's enrichment activities.

But no date has been announced for those talks, with the six nations awaiting the results both of the Vienna meeting and a planned Nov. 25 IAEA inspection of an enrichment plant being built near the holy city of Qom. Iran informed the IAEA of the plant in a confidential letter just days before President Barack Obama and the leaders of France and Britain jointly told the world of its existence and denounced Iran for keeping it secret.