Discretion in Aid to Afghans

American aid to the anti-Soviet freedom fighters in Afghanistan has mushroomed into the largest U.S. “covert” operation since the Vietnam War--all without significant public or congressional debate of the long-term ramifications. This is a situation that should not be allowed to continue.

Afghanistan borders the Soviet Union, just as Mexico borders the United States. This means that the Soviets can easily match and surpass any escalation of the war initiated by Washington. And the heavier and more overt the American involvement, the more stubbornly the Soviets will dig in.

The people of Afghanistan are victims of one of the most rapacious, unbridled acts of aggression in this century. Human-rights abuses by the Soviet invaders border on genocide. If there was ever a situation that cried out for outrage among the peoples of the world, this is it. But world reaction has been relatively mild; when 119 members of the United Nations voted for a resolution calling for withdrawal of the invaders, they were too timid to condemn the Soviet Union by name.

The courageous Afghan guerrillas who have been fighting the Soviet invaders since 1979 cannot possibly win a military victory in the sense of driving the aggressors out. Their best hope is to wear the Russians down to the point that Moscow will consider a decent political settlement allowing a neutralist Afghanistan a substantial measure of self-rule.

More than human empathy is involved. The United States has a strategic interest in preventing the Soviet Union from nailing down Afghanistan as a military base from which to threaten Pakistan, an America ally, as well as Western interests in and around the oil-rich Middle East. Thus the mujahideen deserve not only moral support but military help as well.

The question is how much aid is wise and appropriate.

Washington began providing modest covert military aid to the guerrillas during the Carter Administration. Under prodding from Congress, that aid has escalated during the Reagan presidency to more than $250 million a year, with China and the Muslim countries providing a similar amount.

American money and arms have been channeled through leaders of the 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, with the approval and cooperation of the Pakistani government. That arrangement, however, is causing growing nervousness in Pakistan.

When President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq went to Moscow in March for the funeral of the late Soviet leader Konstantin U. Chernenko, new Kremlin boss Mikhail S. Gorbachev bluntly warned him to stop “interfering” in Afghanistan. To back up the threat, the Soviets and their Afghan puppets are said to have conducted 60 bombing and strafing attacks on Pakistani border areas this year, and to be actively promoting strife among ethnic groups in Pakistan.

Zia and his generals are unruffled, but almost all of the country’s opposition parties are saying that Pakistan’s firm support of the Afghan guerrillas has become too dangerous, and that the government should try to reach a settlement with Moscow’s puppet government in Afghanistan. Even Zia’s own hand-picked prime minster has said publicly that Pakistan “cannot afford to defy with impunity such a big power.”

Common decency calls for the United States to extend humanitarian aid to the suffering Afghan people, to do its utmost to focus world opinion on the atrocities being committed by the Soviets and their Quisling Afghan allies, and to extend an appropriate level of covert military aid.

But it is not in the American interest--or the interest of the Afghan people, for that matter--to goad the Soviets into introducing more and more occupation troops into Afghanistan, to sow the seeds of civil strife in Pakistan or to set the stage for Soviet military actions against Pakistan that the United States would be treaty-bound to resist. Yet there is little evidence that the ramifications of the growing U.S. involvement have been thought through by either Congress or the Administration.