Rendon Groups Helps Afghan Government With Image

"The Pentagon has hired the Rendon Group to counsel and coordinate communications for Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. "The U.S., according to the New York Times, wants to bolster the leadership of Karzai by promoting 'visible signs of reconstruction.' The paper reports that Karzai's government, in recent weeks, has issued 'choreographed announcements about hundreds of schools and clinics to be built or rehabilitated in the next few months.' Karzai and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the country's defacto CEO, made a media splash on April 17 with a ceremony to celebrate the planting of 850,000 trees as part of the 'greening of Kabul' campaign." But Afghanistan is far from the success story that the Bush administration has been projecting, according to a recent New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh. An unpublished report commissioned by the Pentagon found that "the victory in Afghanistan was not, in the long run, a victory at all," Hersh writes.