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There was some awful news from Afghanistan last week, overlooked in the midst of Egypt's tectonic

eruption. Kabul Bank is near collapse. Apparently the owners — who include President Hamid Karzai's

brother Mahmood and other assorted political cronies — had, among other nefarious activities, taken the

bank's assets and speculated in Dubai real estate, which promptly crashed. The Afghan government

does most of its business through Kabul Bank; if the bank fails, the government won't be able to pay its

workers, including the army. Millions in international aid may be washed away.

And so, a familiar dilemma: Bail out the bank or let it collapse? My first thought was that the situation

might provide the NATO coalition with some leverage: we could offer to bail out the bank, but only if

Karzai stepped aside and allowed an esteemed technocrat — like Ashraf Ghani, who ran for President

against Karzai and was crushed — to run the show in the interim. But this was no leverage at all, as I

learned in conversations with several Afghan sources. Karzai would just as soon allow the bank to

collapse. "Then he could say [to the Americans]," a Western diplomat told me, "You figure out a way to

pay the army."

How on earth do we get saddled with such creepy clients as Karzai and Egyptian President Hosni

Mubarak, over and over again? In large part, it's a vestige of the Cold War, when all the world was a

potential theater in the struggle against communism. Afghanistan was certainly one; the Soviet departure

created a vacuum, and the Taliban rushed in. The Kissingerian effort to transfer Egypt from the Soviet

account to the American side in the 1970s, later perfected by Jimmy Carter, was certainly another.

Our adventures in the world have been accompanied by a never-ending tug-of-war between U.S. foreign

policy realists and idealists. Through much of the 20th century, the idealists tended to be liberals in the

spirit of Woodrow Wilson, who wanted World War I to make the world "safe for democracy." Since

Vietnam, however, liberals have been more pessimistic. They winced when Ronald Reagan called the

Soviet Union an "evil empire," fearing a nuclear confrontation. They were infuriated by the naiveté and hubris of George W. Bush's "Freedom Agenda," which was promoted as a rationale for the invasion of

Iraq after that country's weapons of mass destruction turned out to be a mirage. They are increasingly

skeptical about the war in Afghanistan and appalled by the prospect of a pre-emptive war with Iran.

Nowadays, the foreign policy idealists tend to be neoconservatives — and as Egypt erupted, they were

crowing. "Dictatorships are never truly stable," Elliott Abrams, the former Reagan and Bush

national-security expert, wrote in the Washington Post. "Regimes that make moderate politics impossible

make extremism far more likely." These were noble sentiments, celebrating Bush the Younger's agenda.

Others cited Condoleezza Rice's 2005 Cairo speech, in which she publicly chided Mubarak and called for

democratic reform. But Rice's speech was just rhetoric; in reality, Bush embraced Mubarak as fiercely as

his predecessors, fearing that an Egyptian epiphany would produce an Islamist government. Indeed, the

tangible fruits of the Freedom Agenda turned out to be mostly rotten: elections in the Palestinian

territories, which no one but Hamas (and Bush) wanted, produced a Hamas plurality; a push for

democracy in Afghanistan produced a foolish constitution, centralizing power in a notoriously

decentralized country, and corrupt elections. And the jury is still out on Iraq, where the most vital

"democratic" force may turn out to be the populist, Iran-leaning cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

The truth is, both strict realism and idealism have failed us overseas. Too often, realism is just a rationale

for maintaining the autocratic status quo, which never lasts, especially when presided over by terminal

narcissists like Mubarak and Karzai. Too often, idealism assumes democracy can be plopped into a

culture without a middle class or a history of free institutions.

A smarter foreign policy would quietly promote a careful transition from autocracy to something more

benign. The best way to do this is to latch onto institutions, not individual leaders, in the developing

countries we seek as allies. Sadly, the most reliable institution to latch onto — to train, equip and support

— is often the army. Humanitarian aid is nice, but difficult to dispense and too often corrupted. Military aid

comes with strings that bind — the continuing need for spare parts, for example. But strong armies create

security, a necessary precursor for democracy.

It is not a sure thing, of course; armies have provided a steady global diet of horrific dictators. In some

cases, like Pakistan, military assistance helps create greater regional tension. But when we're lucky

abroad, as in Turkey, the military midwifes the transition to democracy. That will be true in Egypt as well

— and perhaps even in Afghanistan — if we're lucky.