On my way home from work tonight, I caught a segment on NPR’s All Things Considered about the massacre in Uzbekistan a few weeks ago. The group Human Rights Watch investigated the incident and now claims that as many as 500 un-armed civilians were killed when demonstrations were violently put down by Uzbek troops.

The story seems straightforward enough. Human Rights Watch lays out what happened and claims “government soldiers systematically mowed down a group of about 300 as they tried to escape.” The Uzbek government claims that only 100 or so people were killed and that Islamic militants were to blame for the violence.

Soon after hearing the background story, I figured out why this story was on NPR. The story line took a familiar turn and began talking about abuse in the name of fighting terrorism. They could have stopped the segment around the 2:40 minute mark and it would have been an informative news report. A country is abusing its citizens in order to maintain power, all under the cover of fighting terrorism.

But no…

The last minute and a half is spent correlating the U.S., and President Bush in particular, to the Uzbek government. The Uzbek government, “regarded as a useful ally in the fight against terrorism, has provided Washington with an airbase for its operations in next door Afghanistan.”

The Human Rights Watch spokesman says, “The Bush administration has been too willing to disregard abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism.” And he then says that the U.S. should withdraw its military forces from the airbase in Uzbekistan.

Here is my beef with this report. Sometimes in war or other times of necessity, you need to make deals with unsavory characters. Sometimes those deals come back to haunt you, but you still have to make them in order to succeed. Iraq and Afghanistan are both prime examples. We supported Saddam because we saw Iran as the bigger threat to the region. We looked away from his excesses in order to keep pressure on the Iranians. The same with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. People have also complained about Pakistan as well.

I have no doubt that the Uzbek government is probably a bunch of sons of bitches and that they probably did mow down a bunch of innocent people. Am I happy about that? No, not a bit. I think it is a crime and one day the Uzbek leaders will pay for their crimes. But does it change my opinion about the U.S. having an airbase in the country? Not a bit. We apparently need the base. So President Bush is not going to publicly chastise the Uzbek government, but I bet he has had a few phone conversations with its leaders. When the time comes that we no longer need the air base, we should then leave. But until that time, we should stay.

This is kind of like when the Clinton administration made our intelligence agencies stop using assets that had questionable backgrounds. Well goodness sakes! Who do you think will have access to a bunch of Islamic thugs? A group of Boy Scouts? No! You need killers and drug runners and other “unsavory” people on our payroll to keep us informed. Will some of those people be involved in criminal activity? Most certainly. Will we look the other way in order to keep them as an asset? I hope so, within reason of course.

It is an unfortunate fact that you have to do business with bad people. I will use the phrase that Liberals love to use “the greater good”. If having some bad people as your ally helps “the greater good” and saves U.S. lives, then sign them up. It is infantile to believe otherwise.