Wrong Policy in Angola

President Reagan will soon approve a new anti-communist venture to do in Angola what he is already doing in Nicaragua, according to congressional sponsors of the program. That is to be regretted. The program, as Secretary of State George P. Shultz has made clear to congressional leaders, would place at risk the quiet American diplomacy intended to resolve some of the critical Southern African issues and, perhaps worst of all, would place the United States squarely on the side of South Africa in supporting an uncertain and disruptive guerrilla war.

Under the proposal introduced by Rep. Claude Pepper (D-Fla.), the United States would provide $27 million in non-lethal, humanitarian assistance to the UNITA rebels of Jonas Savimbi, now at war with the government of Angola, just as similar aid is now furnished by Congress to the contras waging war against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

Shultz has argued with good reason that this sort of aid package would derail a longstanding American effort to untangle some of the truly consequential confusions of Southern Africa by getting Cuban troops out of Angola and South African troops out of Angola and Namibia, and finally bringing Namibia itself to nationhood.

The reservations of the secretary of state are not persuasive to those who advocate confrontation wherever Marxism is perceived, however. How else to stand tall and proud? This simplistic, ideological and often counterproductive approach is, unhappily, gaining wide acceptance in Washington. Few in either party want to explain in the 1986 election how they could have denied bandages and food, or even guns, to freedom fighters.

Bandages and bullets are not the real issue. Intervention in Angola has some particularly negative implications. At a critical moment in the affairs of Southern Africa, it makes the United States an ally of South Africa, which has sustained and directly defended Savimbi’s UNITA forces. It provides Angola with justification for the prolongation of the Cuban expeditionary forces. It interrupts a process of negotiation that had shown signs of prying Angola away from the close embrace of Moscow. And it could jeopardize the close American commercial ties with Angola through the Americans who are developing and exporting to the West Angola’s rich petroleum reserves.

Nevertheless, Pepper is picking up co-sponsors of his aid plan at a rapid pace. His staff is asserting with confidence that Shultz does not speak for the Administration and that the National Security staff in the White House, the Defense Department and the CIA are all in agreement with the rebel aid plan, promising presidential support “in a matter of weeks.”

That would be dangerously shortsighted.