COLUMN ONE : Cold War’s Forgotten Front Line : Afghanistan was the battlefield in a clash of the superpowers. They spent billions in the bloody conflict, but now some say the U.S. and Russia have turned their backs on the shattered nation.

In the not too distant past, a remote land of towering peaks and tough, resilient people was deemed so crucial to the world’s future that the United States boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games to display its solidarity.

Then, Western politicians proclaimed, freedom’s front line ran along the jagged, snow-crested peaks of Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountain range and the southern bank of the Amu Darya, a storied river once forded by Alexander the Great.

“We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives--on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua--to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth,” President Ronald Reagan later declared.

That promise was uttered 10 years ago. To translate it into action, the Central Intelligence Agency, in its largest covert operation since the Vietnam War, funneled about $3 billion in aid to Afghan anti-Communist guerrillas.

For the Russians’ part, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in the waning days of the 1970s, it shelled out about $5 billion a year by Western estimates--and sacrificed the lives of 15,000 of its soldiers--to wage an ultimately unsuccessful struggle for mastery of a beautiful but poor chunk of real estate the size of Texas.

But all that was then, and this is now.

Ravaged by three years of a “forgotten war” among its internal factions, Afghanistan has again become an exotic, faraway place forgotten by most of the world, and especially by the superpowers that once dueled so keenly and lavishly to control it.

The now-defunct Cold War rivalry is not the only cause of Afghanistan’s current trauma. Nine Muslim moujahedeen factions that waged holy war against the old rulers installed by Moscow bear a large share of the blame, for turning their guns on each other after ousting President Najibullah and the Communists in April, 1992.

A 10th faction, in control of much of the north, is commanded by a former general of the Communist regime. And a mysterious new fighting force, the Taliban, made up largely of Islamic religious students, has managed to seize eight of Afghanistan’s 28 provinces in a matter of months.

Today, the old superpowers, which furnished the bulk of the assault rifles, rockets, rocket-propelled grenades, armored vehicles and other weapons in the brimming arsenals of the current belligerents, are doing little to stanch the bloodshed and suffering that the arms now cause.

To some, the humanitarian efforts that Washington and Moscow have engaged in seem puny when compared to the vast sums the superpowers expended on the guns and munitions in the first place.

“For the rest of the world, the war in Afghanistan ceased with the end of the Cold War, and people largely continue to ignore the fact that the conflict is producing as many victims today as it did before February, 1989,” when the last Soviet troops withdrew, complains Jean-Michel Monod, delegate-general for Asia and the Pacific for the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The Russians, who unstintingly shipped in 15,000 tons of grain each month to feed the population of beleaguered Kabul when the Communists were in power, contributed only a small quantity of medicines and supplies for Afghan emergency relief in 1993-94.

Of late, no international charity working in Kabul has seen any sign of Russian assistance.

In the most terrible irony of all, the government of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin seems bent these days on duplicating the tragic savagery of the Afghan war on Russian territory in Chechnya.

As for help from the U.S. government, so far this fiscal year it has averaged less than $1 per Afghan resident and exile, according to figures furnished by the State Department last month.

To date, $15.7 million in U.S. government funds have been “obligated,” as Washington bureaucrats say, to helping the Afghans. That is a mere fraction of the $176 million spent on Afghan civilian relief and development in 1989.

“Right now, there is no aid from the Americans. Nothing visible,” said Mohammed Daoud, deputy chief of the Third Political Section in the Afghan Foreign Ministry.

This winter, the only evident signs of U.S. assistance to a people once lionized as Cold War heroes are the cheap blankets and thin plastic floor mats being doled out by workers of CARE International to 12,000 of the neediest families of Afghanistan’s war-shattered capital.

That one-shot, emergency cold-weather relief program is scheduled to end May 15--a timetable that scandalizes humanitarian workers who hold the United States partly responsible for Afghanistan’s current bloodshed and suffering.

“When you go to someone’s house and burn a hole in the carpet, you should either repair it or purchase a new one,” said Bob McKerrow of New Zealand, head of the Kabul delegation of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Other countries, McKerrow and other relief workers report, are doing more to assist the war-shocked Afghans--from France, Britain, the European Union and Scandinavia to Iran and Japan, which supplies all the pharmaceutical supplies used by the Afghan Red Crescent.

“They (the Americans) should be here. Because they were helping here before,” said a field director for nine Afghan Red Crescent mobile clinics and dispensaries in Kabul.

As part of a worldwide retrenchment, the Afghan program of the U.S. Agency for International Development was one of 21 country operations shut down over the last year. AID closed its office in the border town of Peshawar, Pakistan, in September, and agency grants to non-governmental charities working with the Afghans dried up by June.

The U.S. agency’s pullout from Peshawar resulted in a multimillion-dollar giveaway of its equipment, from surgical supplies to four-wheel-drive vehicles, Kabul-based relief agency officials recall with delight.

This June, the last institutional vestige of Washington’s old commitment to keeping “faith” with the Afghans is expected to vanish with the closing of AID’s office in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Many educated Afghans who remember the funds and rhetoric that used to flow with such abundance from Washington find the U.S. policy now appalling and unjust. Sultan Mahmoud Ghazi, 69, son of a former prime minister and cousin of exiled King Mohammed Zahir Shah, says Americans owe his homeland a great debt.

“We liberated our country, it is true, but we also rendered a service that you (the Americans) couldn’t have bought for a trillion dollars,” said Ghazi, who has lived for the last 15 years in Alexandria, Va.

“We are not completely responsible for the collapse of the Soviet Union,” the Afghan exile said. “But we were the principal cause.”

The exact cost to Afghanistan is still a matter of estimate and conjecture. But more than a decade and a half of popular uprising and civil war sandwiched around the Kremlin’s invasion and retreat have exacted a horrible price.

In Afghanistan, the fifth-poorest country in the world according to a UNICEF survey of health and social indicators, an estimated 1 million people died or disappeared during the Soviet occupation.

Five million Afghans fled abroad, most to Pakistan and Iran.

An estimated 12 million people remain, or 3.5 million fewer than before the Soviets’ Dec. 27, 1979, invasion.

Up to a third of the remaining population--3 to 4 million--live in their country as displaced persons, often in grinding poverty.

In Herat, insane women are now kept in a prison, because there is no other place for them. An orphanage in that northwestern city can accommodate 100 youngsters, but 1,300 have lost their parents in the war. In the northern province of Samangan, doctors report that 80% of the families have one or more members with tuberculosis.

In Kabul, men who lost a leg to a mine or a rocket stagger as best they can down the dusty streets on crutches. Women widowed by the war beg passers-by for a bit of charity, hiding their shame under full-length veils.

“Today, everybody has been eroded to the lowest common denominator: cold, hunger, homelessness,” McKerrow said.

Yet, after the Soviet troops pulled out on Feb. 15, 1989, the United States, much of the Western world and Russia rapidly lost interest in a place whose very name--Afghanistan--was once used in U.S. newsrooms as a code word for lands that were so obscure and distant that they meant nothing to the typical reader.

“I speak from a European perspective: The Afghan war belongs to the past for us,” said Dr. Ulrich Roetig of Germany, medical coordinator in Kabul for the International Committee of the Red Cross. “When the Soviets were not a threat anymore, real or fake, they (the Afghans) were not important anymore.”

It did not help the Afghans’ cause that moujahedeen commanders such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a major beneficiary of U.S. aid, acted like power-hungry thugs or fanatics, or that the factions that fought the Soviets and their puppet government with such ingenuity and courage began feuding viciously among themselves after sweeping the Communists from Kabul.

Meanwhile, new international crises came along--the breakup of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Yugoslav federation and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Despite the ringing words about liberty, it had always been clear that, for many Western leaders, Afghanistan was chiefly important as a pawn in the geopolitical chess game of the Cold War, or as a theater of operations where, in Reagan’s words, the Soviets could be given a “bloody nose.”

U.S. officials acknowledge that levels of American aid to the Afghan people are dramatically down from the days of the Cold War and Soviet occupation, but they say there are objective reasons.

“It’s hard to convince donors to put money into a country where there’s no central government and where there’s a war going on,” said John Hoover, Afghanistan desk officer at the State Department. “It’s a hard sell, especially in the current climate.”

And the sales job may be getting much harder, what with the new Republican-dominated Congress’ hostility to foreign aid when no U.S. interests are directly at stake.

Last year, the U.S. government gave $38.5 million to U.N. agencies or private organizations involved in Afghan relief, State Department officials said. That included $10.6 million to assist refugees, chiefly Afghans, in South Asia, $9 million to purchase 30,000 metric tons of wheat to feed Afghan refugees in camps in Pakistan, $2 million for UNICEF immunization programs targeting Afghan children, $2 million for mine-clearing operations in Afghanistan and $2.7 million to feed and house 200,000 refugees who fled last year’s flare-up of bombardments in Kabul for camps in the eastern city of Jalalabad.

The U.S. money was hard, if not impossible, to spot, said Hoover, because it got mixed in with funds from other sources.

Stephen Masty, Kabul emergency coordinator for CARE, the agency now handing out U.S.-purchased blankets and floor mats in Kabul, believes that his country owes the Afghans much more because of the United States’ leading role in arming and supplying the Afghan resistance.

“There’s a moral argument for it,” said the 40-year-old from Birmingham, Mich., who wrote speeches for the Republican National Committee during Reagan’s first term. “True, I doubt people pay much attention to moral arguments in Washington.”

But much more can now be done, he asserted. “Ninety percent of this country is . . . peaceful,” Masty said.

Other foreign aid workers agreed that fighting is no longer so widespread as to hinder humanitarian relief activities in most of Afghanistan.

Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is budgeting $43 million this year for Afghan relief operations--a 75% increase over 1994--say that, of late, there has been a revival of international interest in Afghanistan. But diplomatically, they note that the United States has not been part of it.

“It is regrettable that those countries that were the most involved in the 1980s have lost interest in the Afghan struggle,” said Peter G. Stocker of Switzerland, head of the Red Cross delegation to Afghanistan.

Last year, 250 tons of food got through by truck convoy to Kabul when 1,000 tons were needed. Even in the relative calm that has prevailed in the past weeks, hundreds of people, mostly civilians, are wounded in the capital and its environs every week.

Millions of mines--10 million by one estimate--are scattered over the Afghan countryside and remain potentially deadly until deactivated.

In the face of such enormous needs, the international aid effort for Afghanistan is stretched dangerously thin in many places.

There may be 151 non-governmental humanitarian relief organizations based in Peshawar. But in some Afghan provinces, such as Ghor, there are just a few, or a single one.

“We need to tell the world that was so supportive of Afghanistan in 1979 and 1980--and the years afterward--that the situation is very bad, and that much more support is needed,” McKerrow said.

Dahlburg was recently on assignment in Kabul, Afghanistan.