Pentagon Denies 'Deal with the Devil' (on Russian Helos, at Least)

The Afghan Air Force's MI-17 helicopter, courtesy of the Pentagon -- and the same Russian export firm that sells the helo to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. Photo: Wikimedia

Russia's MI-17 helicopters excel at two things lately. One is killing Syrian civilians. The other is helping the Afghan Air Force. The Obama administration says it's not fine with the first while it pays for the second, and is hoping you don't notice the glaring contradiction.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called out Russia on Tuesday for selling Bashar Assad the attack helicopters. The arrival of the latest helo shipment, courtesy of the state arms exporter Rosoboronexport, will 'escalate the conflict quite dramatically,' she said. It's the loudest the U.S. has criticized Russia over Syria.

Just one problem. Russia also sells MI-17s to the United States. The U.S. buys the helicopters for the Afghan Air Force, which is familiar with the airframe. The price tag could reach $1 billion. To stop doing business with Rosoboronexport in protest of its complicity in the Syrian slaughter could jeopardize the Obama team's plans to hand the Afghanistan war to the Afghans in 2014. To continue to do business with Rosoboronexport is to risk effectively subsidizing Assad's massacres.

Judging by the Pentagon's reaction to Clinton, Vladimir Putin can expect the checks to keep arriving on time. 'I don't like to make deals with any devil here,' insisted Pentagon spokesman George Little. His colleague, Capt. John Kirby, asserted that the 'type of airframe' the Syrians use to kill their civilians 'is immaterial.'

It wasn't long ago that the Russian arms exporter was was barred from doing business with the government because it sold weapons to rogue states like Iran and, well, Syria. That's why Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) wrote to the Pentagon last month in disbelief that it was still buying the same helicopters from the same state-owned company that Assad relies on for his massacres.

'We're not buying helicopters for the Syrian regime,' Little said. We're buying helicopters in support of the Afghan Air Force.'

The Pentagon's policy chief, James Miller, wrote Cornyn in May acknowledging that the MI-17s from Rosoboronexport were part of Assad's arsenal. He pledged to 'register our objections with Russia at all levels and every opportunity' ' while hectoring Cornyn that 'our acquisition of these helicopters is a key part of our ongoing strategy to hand over security of Afghanistan to the Afghan people.'

Clinton's public criticism skewers the Pentagon on the horns of a self-inflicted dilemma. It's done business with Rosoboronexport in Iraq and Afghanistan for years, even as the arms firm delivered its goods years late. It can't very well act surprised that Rosoboronexport does business with thugs, as the firm used to be under sanctions for precisely that under a law called the Iran-Syria Nonproliferation Act. Now the Pentagon is dug in deep to both Rosoboronexport and the questionable Afghan Air Force; unwilling to acknowledge its incoherence; and the Syrian people pay for that choice with their lives.