"Until this week, a little-noticed part of the United States’ war effort here included teaching Afghan officials the art of public relations — mainly, how to give news conferences — at an American-financed government information center.
But on Wednesday, as word spread that the American military and civilian advisers had been abruptly pulled from the center this week, both American and Afghan officials broke a cardinal rule of public relations: They could not get their stories straight.
The Americans said that it was time for Afghan officialdom to deliver news on its own, and that the move had been planned for some time as part of the broader drawdown slowly under way. The Afghans said the Americans were annoyed over a news conference on Saturday that featured criticism of civilian deaths in NATO raids."
