Two Saddams in our future

The White House Situation Room is famous for the clocks on its wall. They once told the time in different world capitals. Today, when the discussions turn to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the international concerns of the United States, the clocks show time zones that are less traditional. In fact, these clock run in reverse, revealing not what time it is now, but how much time we have left.

One is set to say "Beltway time," keeping track of the hours remaining until the next election. Another, the "budget clock," shows how long it will take us to run out of resources. And the third shows just how much time is left before we’re drained of the political will necessary to maintaining our costly engagements in these countries. With every tick these clocks grow louder, sometimes drowning out all other conversation in the room.

Understand the role that these clocks play and it is easy to determine what actions America will take. 

For example, take the situation in Afghanistan. The story of this week concerning that country has to be the series of revelations about Afghan officials who were or are on the CIA payroll. Kudos for the scoop go to the New York Times with their insight that one of the top aides to President Hamid Karzai targeted in a corruption probe, Mohammed Zia Salehi, chief of administration for the Afghan National Security Council, turns out to be on the payroll of the CIA. The Times story in which this fact was revealed goes on to suggest that Salehi’s “ties underscore doubts about how seriously the Obama administration intends to fight corruption here." This is a charmingly polite way of framing the clear contradiction between America’s public and operational stances in Kabul. Finding that a Karzai aide is corrupt or that the CIA might have found it necessary to work with corrupt assets in Afghanistan is roughly as surprising as finding out that some members of the Taliban opposition are on the payroll of our allies, the Pakistanis’ intelligence services or  that an American politician might play golf with a lobbyist.

But the question the Times‘s innocently frames (I seriously doubt it was offered as naively as it might sound), is whether the United States will ultimately push harder for clean government in Kabul or, alternatively, we will tolerate something less than clean if it looks like it will be robust enough to survive and assume meaningful responsibility for keeping a lid on the country?

The clocks on the wall speak the answer.

As rightfully outraged as Americans are with Karzai’s crony state and its wannabe kleptocrats, we’ll take them if they let more Americans head for the door. The election clock demands progress by 2012. The budget clock demands cost reductions sooner rather than later. And the political will clock tolls loudest of all for the entire Afghan exercise.

We’ll object. We’ll publicly condemn Karzai. We’ll push for more "transparency" — although I suspect the Obama administration would prefer slightly less than provided in the Times‘s article. We’ll even make the morally irrefutable case that the government should stand up for the women of Afghanistan, for religious tolerance, and other basic rights.

And in the end, none of these things will be as important to us — to the clocks on the wall — as stability. And when it comes to stability when we don’t have time and we don’t have unlimited resources and we don’t have the political will to stay, then we’ll take what we can get. It may require we double Listerine rations in the rest rooms across from the White House mess to get the awful taste out of our mouths. But as we have so often in the past, we’ll make wry remarks about how we never expected Jeffersonian democracy in Kabul and then we’ll swallow hard and buy into the regime of another thug.

It’s a great U.S. tradition. It’s the tradition that gave us among many others Diem (and Ky and Thieu) in Vietnam, Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, Mobutu in Zaire, Noriega in Panama, and most recently and most resonantly, Saddam Hussein. We bought into him and propped him up because in the end realpolitik is what we thought we could afford. We looked the other way as he gassed his people because he put a lid on Iraq and counterbalanced Iran. We looked the other way … right until we couldn’t afford to anymore (in 1991). And even then, even after feeling compelled to go to war with him, we left him in place because it was cheaper and easier and more politically palatable at home than the alternatives.

And that’s why we’ll do the same thing in Afghanistan with Karzai or some bad compromise like him. And that’s why in the end we’ll probably end up with the same thing in Iraq. We’ll hope for democracy but if local political antibodies in the end reject that idea, we’ll settle for stability. (And if you’re looking for a position as America’s blunt political instrument of choice in one of these places, please remember that a) we prefer thugs who periodically advance our interests and b) that we seem to be able to turn top officials into CIA operatives when it suits us.)

That’ll be one of the great ironies of this era of American warfare in the Middle East. It’ll be defined in equal parts by our grotesquely misplayed effort to depose Saddam Hussein and by the fact that we will end up with not one but two Saddam-lites in the region. In fact, we’ll be lucky if they end up to be Saddam-lites, strongmen of dubious moral fiber, rather than full-fledged versions that’ll leave us wondering yet again about the hidden, long-term costs of realpolitik.