US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should urge the Uzbek government to take immediate steps to end forced labor, including the state-sponsored mobilization of children, in the cotton sector, a coalition of nongovernmental organizations said today in a letter to Clinton.

Uzbek authorities released the rights defender Alisher Karamatov from prison on April 12, 2012, after he served almost two thirds of a 9-year prison sentence. Karamatov, an active member of the Human Rights Society of Uzbekistan, who monitored violations of social and economic rights, in particular the rights of farmers and the disabled, was detained in April 2006, prosecuted, and convicted on politically-motivated charges in June 2006.

Twenty years ago, in July 1991, I was poised to start a job researching human rights violations in the Soviet Union. A month later, the failed coup to unseat Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev precipitated rapid political changes that would lead to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 25. Watching these events, my family told me I would no longer have a job. Like many others, they assumed that the end of communism would usher in a new era of democracy, the rule of law, and human rights in the Soviet Union’s successor states. I started my new job as planned and it only took five minutes to see that those assumptions were wrong.

So is it right to kiss up to tyrants when their fortunes are up? The question may be moot when it comes to Qaddafi, but it's a decision that U.S. officials still confront every day -- not only in the Arab world, but also with regard to other brutal and undemocratic "allies," for example in Central Asia.