Wall Street Journal

It's not a particularly new story, but repetition doesn't make it any prettier: The U.S. is continuing to send arms to the government of Pakistan, where American weapons are evidently being used in the effort to crush the secessionist movement of the Bengalis in the eastern part of the nation.

Such aid, to Pakistan and to many other countries, was of course intended primarily to provide strength against possible Communist aggression, not to settle internal scores or make war against other non-Communist countries. Not many years ago, for an additional example in the same area, India and Pakistan were having at each other, and U.S. arms were involved then too.

According to Washington estimates, the U.S. sent Pakistan more than $1 billion worth of arms from 1954 to 1965, when the aid was embargoed. The embargo was eased in ,1967, and now this country is reportedly shipping ammunition and spare parts for weapons.

True enough, if the U.S. weren't supplying arms, others presumably would, and they might well be unfriendly others. Still, our military aid and sales to Pakistan do not appear to have deflected it from its leftward course in recent years. At the least one might think the U.S. could insist on more effective controls on the uses to which its weapons are put.

The question is one of degree, we suppose. America's lavish dispensing of arms all around the non-Communist world was part of a general approach which critics called global interventionism. Now that the Nixon doctrine stipulates considerably less intervention, perhaps curtailment of military aid is being studied it should be. For our part, we would not mind seeing the U.S. lose its prominence in the arms-furnishing business.