ASHINGTON -- The primary source of information for the average Afghan is the radio, often a transistor made 30 years ago. The 20 transmitting towers of the Taliban's Radio Shariat (meaning "Islamic law") are spewing out hatred of America all the time.

Why is there no Radio Free Afghanistan broadcasting the truth about the consequences of harboring the headquarters of terrorism?

Why are Afghans not told that their rulers' decision to hide Osama bin Laden is the direct cause of the withdrawal of U.N. relief and the starvation that they now face?

Why are the voices of revered, mainstream Muslim clerics not broadcast denouncing the perversion of Islam by the terrorists, and reminding the faithful that murder by suicide will lead not to heaven but to eternal damnation?

Before a single bomb is dropped on a suspected training camp, the U.S. should be doing what it knows best how to do: using psychological warfare to weaken the grip of the terrorists on the local population.

We are failing to make life more difficult for the terrorists in their caves because the Bush war planners have not thought of it yet. The chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, overseer of our several official overseas broadcasters, is an amiable Gore fund-raiser long awaiting replacement. The Voice of America leadership is even more vacant.

Which U.S. government broadcaster should be charged with stirring anger among Afghans at rulers eager to bring further devastation to their country? That mission of countering Radio Shariat's propaganda should go to RFE/RL, the "radio free" outfit experienced in acting as a surrogate free press in repressive nations like Iran, Iraq and China.

But evenhanded journalists at the V.O.A., backed by political holdovers on the Broadcasting Board, don't want those hard-sell types invading their turf. The V.O.A. broadcasts to Afghanistan with fine impartiality in the Dari, Pashto, Urdu and Arabic languages, and yesterday stepped up its time on the air; RFE/RL broadcasts only in Turkmen and Uzbek, understood in Afghanistan's north, where our problem is not.

In the squabble over a measly $15 million in expansion money, here is why the V.O.A. is the wrong voice in this area in wartime:

On the day after the twin towers catastrophe, a V.O.A. reporter in London broadcast an account of two interviews. One was with a cleric who "warns that no accusations against Islamists or Arab groups should be made before knowing the full truth." This was "balanced" by an interview with Yasir al Serri, identified only as "a leader of Egypt's largest Islamist group, the Gama'a Islamiyya, which has worked to overthrow the Egyptian government."

Listeners were not informed that this terrorist group killed 58 foreign tourists and 4 Egyptians four years ago. The reporter said that al Serri "warns that retaliation by Washington will only lead to more violence. He lays the blame for the unprecedented assault on the U.S. financial and military policy in the Middle East."

Stung by criticism of this broadcast, Andre de Nesnera, the V.O.A.'s news director, admitted that the extremist was improperly identified, but argued that for the agency to remain "a credible news organization," such interviews with terrorists "will be part of our balanced, accurate, objective and comprehensive reporting, providing our listeners with both sides of the story."

After a call from Jesse Helms's office protesting "equal time for Hitler," the bureaucrat warming the vacant V.O.A. director's seat issued a belated guideline that "we will not give a platform to terrorists or extremist groups."

The nation is on a kind of war footing. Even in peacetime, news credibility does not flow from splitting the moral difference between good and evil. In the climate of today's undeclared war, private media in democracies are free to take either or neither side, but U.S. taxpayer-supported broadcasting is supposed to be on our side.

That's why we need an American signal in Afghanistan's five languages with a clear, truthful message: Bin Laden and his gang are the cause of present and future misery, and the suicides who murder innocents are eternally punished by Allah.

And for the Pentagon's choosers of "targets of value": consider, in the first strike, the score of towers and mobile transmitters of Radio Shariat.