The Wall Street Journal, by Peter R. Kann

By Peter R. Kann

NEAR MEHERPUR, East Pakistan—By oxcart and by rickshaw, on bicycles and an occasional truck, but mostly by foot, people and soldiers of Bangla Desh—the Bengal Nation—are retreating toward the Indian border.

From Meherpur, half a mile farther back, come the thump of the West Pakistan army's mortars and the crackle of its small-arms fire.

"Punjabis (West Pakistanis). Bombs, cannon at Meherpur," shouts a group of Bengalis clinging to an India-bound truck that stops only long enough to let the last armed man at this village crossroads climb aboard.

The four-mile trip back to the Indian border is a tour of largely deserted villages. The richer residents of Meherpur had evacuated their town a day before. This day it is mostly villagers who are fleeing: a barefoot, ragged woman leading six children, all with bundles of belongings balanced atop their heads; two men carrying a dismantled bed; an old blind man being led along by what seems to be a seeing-eye cow.

Waging a Weak War

Back at the Indian border, in and around an Indian military compound, sit 100 or more sullen members of the Bangla Desh army, their insignia ripped off. Also on the Indian side are more than a dozen Bangla Desh Jeeps and two recoilless rifles, perhaps the only ones in the Bangla Desh army. A few miles farther to the rear in the nearest Indian border town, are clusters of babbling politicians, civil servants and professional men who talk about fighting and dying to the very last man.

Many Bengalis, of course, have been dying since the Pakistan civil war began in March. But, for a variety of reasons, not nearly enough have been fighting. As a result, Bangla Desh appears, at this stage, to have waged one of the weakest—and perhaps shortest—revolutionary wars on record.

There are several reasons: lack of weaponry and military knowhow; weak leadership and poor organization from the bourgeois Bengalis who have led this first phase of the freedom movement; and the generally martial character of most Bengali people. Of greatest importance perhaps have been the determination and toughness—and brutality—of the West Pakistan army. In less than one month, with fewer than 50,000 men and limited firepower and air support, that army has been able largely to subdue, for the time being, 75 million hostile Bengali people.

The Long Road to Liberation

This isn't to say the cause of Bangla Desh is finished. But if East Pakistan is ever to be in-dependent, it won't happen through the kind of spontaneous-combustion revolution of the past four weeks. Liberation will be won over years, not weeks; by more action and less rhetoric; with guerrilla tactics, not conventional combat; and perhaps by militant leftists rather than idealistic moderates.

Much will also depend on India—whether it will provide arms and border sanctuaries for a protracted liberation war.

In any case, West Pakistan faces serious problems. How to deploy its army of occupation across a large, predominantly rural area, particularly with monsoons coming. How to administer what amounts to a bitter reconquered colony. How to piece together East Pakistan's shattered economy and how to keep East Pakistan from becoming a crippling drain on limited West Pakistani resources. How to deal with India should it decide to become more heavily involved in supporting Bengali resistance.

Pakistan's problems will be compounded if unrest develops among ethnic minorities within West Pakistan or if rival generals and politicians in the West cannot stand together in this crisis.

A Clear-Cut Struggle

In an age of confusing liberation struggles and fuzzy moral causes, the issues at stake in this war seem relatively clear-cut. When England granted its Indian empire independence in 1947, the subcontinent was divided along religious lines rather than by any ethnic or geographic logic. The new Muslim nation of Pakistan was split into two halves, separated by 1,200 miles of Hindu India. The Pakistani nation came to be dominated—politically, economically and militarily—by the Punjabis of West Pakistan, and the more populous Bengalis have felt exploited.

In elections last December for a National Assembly, the East Pakistanis bloc voted overwhelmingly for the Bengali nationalist Awami League of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The league won an absolute majority in the assembly, meaning power would have swung to Bengali East Pakistan under a democratic regime. Sheikh Mujibur, a somewhat pro-Western moderate Socialist, demanded autonomy for the East except in defense and foreign affairs. The politicians and generals of West Pakistan balked, for economic and other reasons.

Under cover of negotiations, West Pakistani troops and military supplies were slipped into East Pakistan. The night of March 25 these troops struck swiftly and savagely in Dacca, the East Pakistan capital, brutally suppressing Bengali demonstrators. The army took over in Dacca and the port of Chittagong, and the war was on.

In other towns the Bengalia rose in defiance and proclaimed independence. It was a story-book sort of revolution, with thousands of Patrick Henrys issuing courageous calls to arms and thousands of Betsy Rosses sewing little red, green and yellow Bangla Desh flags. The civil service; police and East Pakistan Rifles (a Bengali militia attached to the Pakistan army) joined the liberation, as indeed did Bengalis of every social class and political persuasion. The Bangla Desh flag flew from primitive mud huts as well as from city offices, from oxcarts as well as from Jeeps. The revolutionary slogan “Jai Bangla” (Victory to Bengal) was shouted by peasant children as well as portly politicians.

But there were things the Bengalis didn't have and didn't do. Except for the militiamen of the East Pakistan Rifles, the liberation array was almost entirely lacking in arms and training. Even the Rifles had only light, old-fashioned weapons. In many areas the Bengalis did little to supplement these arms with homemade weapons like Molotov cocktails or primitive mines.

The Bengalis were surprisingly unprepared for a war that many of them had deemed possible, even likely, for years. They had no effective communication and liaison system—not even by runners—and thus Bangla Desh fortunes differed, and suffered, district by district, village by village. The leadership has been composed largely of Awami League functionaries and civil servants. They have tended to sit in the towns, first emotionally celebrating the liberation of their people and later emotionally bewailing their lack of airplanes, artillery and foreign support. (Sheikh Mujibur, now believed to be a captive of the Pakistani army, is typically Bengali. Says one critic, who is also Bengali: "An impossible man. Whenever you ask him a question, he answers with a quotation from Tagore." Tagore was Bengal's greatest writer.)

The West Pakistan army, perhaps cowed by the thought of 75 million hostile Bengalis spread across 55,000 square miles (East Pakistan is roughly the size of Arkansas), spent most of the first two-weeks of the war holed up in urban military cantonments. But when the army finally began to move, behind air and artillery cover, Bangla Desh offered little opposition.

An Unopposed Army

By late last week Bangla Desh forces were evacuating the towns, and the Pakistani army was rolling down the roads generally unopposed. In some areas there were reports of Bangla Desh leaders and soldiers moving out into the villages to prepare for guerrilla war. But in other places—like Meherpur and additional towns near the border with Indian West Bengal—Bangla Desh forces were simply fleeing into India. At the Indian border town of Gede, a Bengali school principal, who a week before had been welcoming journalists to the Bangla Desh provisional capital, is taking up residence in an Indian guesthouse. "We will fight to the last of our 75 million people, to the last man," he says.

Another refugee at Gede is perhaps overly defeatist but sincere: "The Punjabis are trigger-happy men bent to rule us at whatever the cost. They are killing thousands of our people, but what can we do? We have no arms. The Indians gave us a few guns—duck guns. But the Punjabis aren't sitting ducks. Yesterday we were tilling our land, and today we must be a guerrilla army. How can it be? Some say the monsoon will help us. But how? We have pen knives and staves, and we will go through the water—splash, splash, splash. They have planes and cannon and carbines. What can we do?"

Three miles across the border, at the East Pakistan town of Darsana, several score Bangle Desh supporters are sitting in a former police post, worrying each other with conflicting reports about the imminent fall of the provisional capital, Chuadanga, which lies another 10 miles down the road. "Two Pakistan planes have bombed Chuadanga. . . . More than one Bengali has been killed. . . . Punjabi troops are only three miles from the city. . . . There are no Bangla Desh troops near the town; they have all left already."

"We Will Die"

One politician gives a solemn and sincere speech about the failure of the outside world to come to the aid of Bangla Desh. A small knot of men is watching a medic operate on a pudgy compatriot—a dab of iodine is being applied to a small cut on his left palm. Another local leader is asked what the Bangla Desh forces plan as the opposing army advances. "We will die," he says, and the others grimly nod. But the next day the Pakistan army walked into Chuadanga unopposed.

A constant sad refrain these days from Bangla Desh people is the failure of the outside world to aid them. The expectations of the Bangla Desh may have been naive, but even far more practical-minded men would have been disappointed at the world response. No great power has helped the Bengalis, who represent a majority of the Pakistani population and are fighting for independence after having been attacked.

Russia has given Bangla Desh a bit of verbal support—in the form of a call to West Pakistan to stop the killing. On the other hand, Red China, a proponent of civil wars, has given strong verbal backing to West Pakistan.

Only India, Pakistan's neighbor and enemy, has given Bangla Desh firm verbal support. India has permitted limited unofficial aid to flow across its borders into East Pakistan and has let Bangla Desh forces and followers take refuge, at least temporarily. But even India has stopped well short of diplomatic recognition or organized military assistance.

The Threat of Chaos

So far, both India and Pakistan, despite bitter charges and countercharges, seem anxious to avoid a real confrontation. But if either drops its current caution, the chaos of East Pakistan could engulf the whole subcontinent.

Only yards from the Indian border, Bangla Desh held a ceremony in a mango grove at a village called Mujibnagar last Saturday. The provisional government of Bangla Desh was officially presented to the world press, a proclamation of independence was read, and speakers made patriotic addresses.

But glory fades quickly for Bangla Desh. The day after the ceremony, the village is deserted except for a few dozen residents. The reviewing stand still sits under a spreading mango tree, but only several ducks and a goose strut around it. The memory of glory lives on, however. Back on the Indian side of the border, a Bangla Desh official is still dreaming about the previous day. "It was a wonderful day," he declares. "Seven ministers and 27 eminences. Very good speeches. A fine ceremony."

By Peter R. Kann

BOYRA, India—Babar Ali Khan, a bearded, barefoot farmer who doesn't know how old he is, has just fled from East Pakistan into this Indian border village. He came leading a rickety little pony cart. In it lies his sister with an untreated bullet wound in her leg.

Babar All Khan has been traveling for five days, ever since West Pakistani Army troops arrived at his village of Haibadpur last week. At that time the farmer's family had 10 members, and they all took refuge in a hole by the river. The soldiers ordered all the villagers to come out of their hiding places. The Khan family obeyed orders. A machine gun immediately mowed down seven of the 10. Only Babar Ali Khan, his wife and wounded sister escaped.

"The people who came out of their holes were shot. The people who did not come out were also shot," Mr. Khan says simply.

Confused, bitter, impoverished and pitiable, Mr. Khan is typical of the Bengali refugees flowing across the Indian border from rebellion-torn East Pakistan. They are fleeing in the wake of the West Pakistani Army's crushing blows to Bangla Desh (Bengal Nation) in East Pakistan. Each arrives with his own tale of West Pakistani Army brutality, his own story of suffering and his own fears about the future.

India's Future Role

The swelling number of refugees poses yet another threat to stability and peace in the area. Nobody really knows how many refugees there are, but estimates range as high as one million. Moreover, a combination of harsh West Pakistani military occupation, economic chaos and future famine in East Pakistan will drive five million to 10 million more Bengali refugees into India during the next 18 months, one Indian general predicts. Some observers think this estimate may be far too high, but the fact that some senior Indian generals believe India will have this many refugees on its hands increases India's sense of involvement in the Pakistani crisis. This, in turn, is further encouragement to Indian intervention in East Pakistan.

It is increasingly likely that India will help to organize, train and arm Bangla Desh guerrilla units and provide them with border sanctuaries from which to operate, sources say. One Indian general estimates it will take about a year to get an effective guerrilla war under way with Indian support. Indian military men fear that if they don't take the initiative, the Bangla Desh movement will succumb to Bengali Communist control, perhaps with furtive Communist China support. (At this point though, the Chinese are backing the West Pakistanis.)

Some analysts think the refugee pool will provide the manpower for a protracted guerrilla war against the West Pakistani occupation forces. Many refugees say they would like to "fight for Bangla Desh" but frequently concede they don't know how. At present, anyway, the refugees clearly lack the leadership, organization, training and weapons that a guerrilla war would require.

The Tragic Stories

The refugees feel they have ample reason to bear fighting grudges against the West Pakistanis. Take Minu Bibi, a pretty young woman of 26 with a large brass ring in her left ear. She came to India alone. The Pakistani Army arrived in her town and shouted, "All Bengalis out." Most of her family followed the order, and her parents and brother were shot. Her sister was raped and then shot. Minu ran into the woods and watched all this. Then she walked for 15 days before reaching the Indian border.

A gaunt middle-aged man blurts out another story: "My whole family killed. . . . We were asleep in the room. . . . My family. . . . My brother, my brother was a student. ... He, too, was killed." The man breaks down. Several generations of a poor Bengali family may sacrifice everything to permit one male family member to achieve the status of student. All of the family's dreams of higher social status, as well as its hopes of future financial support, are pinned to that young man.

Most refugees are desperately poor. Dale Khan, 53, tells a typical tale. The soldiers came into his town, kicked open his door and shot his son-in-law, who was asleep. Dalai Man escaped with his wife and daughter through the back door. He had to leave without even a full set of clothes. He now wears a large rag wrapped around his midsection and a smaller rag draped over his head. He must also eat off a rag. "I have no dish," he explains.

So far, no international relief supplies are reaching the refugees. The only assistance—primitive tent shelters, rice and some basic medical supplies—is coming from official and private Indian sources.

Nobody knows what future these refugees face. Some observers believe that when the immediate chaos in East Pakistan subsides and the West Pakistani Army cools off, many refugees—particularly villagers—will trickle back across the border. In this view, ties to land will prove more powerful than fear or hate.

Other observers believe the refugees are far too bitter and too scared ever to return to an army-occupied East Pakistan. Moreover, the West Pakistani authorities may not let them back. These authorities may decide that vastly overpopulated East Pakistan can do well without the uprooted peasant refugees. The refugees would thus languish here in India. to be gradually absorbed into the masses of poverty-plagued India.

West Pakistan may also consider the more educated refugees as dangerous subversives. Indeed, there have been many stories of Pakistani soldiers systematically wiping out educated middle-class Bengalis, the class that led the Bangla Desh movement. One 33-year-old court clerk says that the army called all the civil servants in his town together to get their pay. "They were called together and then shot," he says. If the middle-class moderates are killed off, or refused re-entry into Paki-stan, leftist militants may end up leading any future stages of the East Pakistan struggle, some observers think.

At the moment, the refugees themselves have differing plans. A 20-year-old farmer whose mother and grandmother were shot by the army is afraid to return. He says he will stay in India "until I see the Bangla Desh flag flying across the border." But Bonoy Kumar Mondol, a young schoolteacher whose father was killed by the army, says he will go back and fight if he is given a gun and taught how to shoot it. "I want Bangla Desh. Let the war continue until independence!" he exclaims.

But many can think only of present grief. Shrouded in rags, wailing and sobbing, four wizened old women crawl out of a crowd of refugees and clutch the feet of two reporters. Their story is a simple one. Their children are dead.

By Peter R. Kann

CALCUTTA—Consider this scenario for an American intervention.

Our ally: The 75 million Bengalis of East Pakistan who, with considerable justification, consider themselves victims of two decades of political and economic exploitation by the Punjabis of West Paldstan. Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his moderate, generally pro-Western Awami League recently won national elections in Pakistan. The Bengalis were then savagely attacked by the Punjabi controlled Pakistan army. Many Bengalis are now determined to fight for an independent Bengal nation (Bangla Desh) but they lack the military knowhow and means with which to fight.

Our enemy: the 70,000 or so West Pakistani troops seeking to suppress the Bengali freedom movement and reoccupy East Pakistan. They are fighting for an autocratic military regime that has close relations with China. They have virtually no support among the Bengalis they seek to rule. They are fighting more than 1,000 miles from home, dependent solely on sea and air supply routes, without the economic resources required for a long and costly war.

An interventionist's dream. First some strong words from Washington, then a few destroyers assigned to cruise the East Pakistan coast. Some dramatic overflights by American jets. If necessary a naval blockade to cut off Pakistan army supplies. Perhaps some air-dropped American carbines for the Bengalis. Only as a last resort some air strikes on Pakistan army bases in East Pakistan. After that, it's only a matter of passing out miracle rice seed to the happy liberated peasants of Bangla Desh—that new pro-Western bastion astride the strategic crossroads where East and Central Asia meet. If only Vietnam had been East Pakistan.

A Natural Victim

As it happened, of course, Bangla Desh did not even rate weak words of support or sympathy from Washington. Presumably the last thing America needs, these days is another war, even a winnable one in a worthy cause. And even if Uncle Sam still considered himself the world's policeman, it's doubtful that he would arrest West Pakistan for assault and battery against the Bengalis. East Pakistan is simply one of those parts of the world that fails to provoke foreign passions. Overpopulated and impoverished, it encroaches on the world's consciousness only when stricken by a calamity of Biblical proportions, like last fall's fearful flood that claimed up to half a million lives. An East Pakistan earthquake that killed only 10,000 would probably rate less attention than a three-car collision on the Jersey Turnpike. East Pakistan is one of the world's natural victims.

All this is only to say the obvious: that American foreign policy doesn't follow moral imperatives. Neither does any other nation's. When the cause of Bangla Desh finally forced its way to the attention of the world's great powers they all reacted with what's called cynicism among men but passes for pragmatism among nations.

The politics of the Indian subcontinent were complicated enough before the cause of Bangla Desh came along. India and Pakistan have been enemies since they were carved out of the subcontinent's communal conflicts in 1947. Russia has edged close to India in recent years. China, for national rather than ideological reasons, is tied to Pakistan. Russia and China, of course, are at odds. America, worried over Soviet influence in India and Chinese influence in Pakistan, has tried to remain friendly with both.

What, then, are the politics of pragmatism of those nations involved with the Bangla Desh cause and of those that have sought to stay uninvolved?

For Pakistan there were several choices: To let democracy have its way, which would have meant, a united Pakistan led, for the first time, by the Bengali majority rather than the Punjabi minority. To grant East Pakistan independence and seek good relations with the new sister state of Bangla Desh. To forcibly resubjugate East Pakistan. Pakistan opted for the third solution. Its army, moved rapidly and ruthlessly, with tactics that included not only wanton slaughter but also systematic slaying of the Bengali middle class: politicians, professional men, students and civil servants. These are precisely the people needed to keep an administration and an economy functioning, in a conquered territory or a new nation. 

In the short run the Pakistan army may well be able to maintain control of East Pakistan—now a hostile, occupied territory. But how to patch up the East Pakistan economy? How to support the cost of the occupation army? How, in the long run, to avoid being bled by a guerrilla war? Perhaps even the Pakistanis are doubtful about their long-term prospects. But if they suspect that they will have to pull out of East Pakistan some year soon, why should they worry about killing off moderate Bengali leadership, about the Bangla Desh movement thus falling into militant leftist hands? Pakistan could then at least leave a chaotic, Communist-veering Bangla Desh as a permanent plague on neighboring India. Or so the Indians fear.

A Sympathetic India

For many reasons, India has been openly sympathetic with the Bangla Desh cause. Pakistan is an enemy, and half an enemy is better than a whole one. An independent Bengal nation, under moderate leadership, might even be friendly to India. As a democracy. India is subject to public pressures, and articulate segments of that public, particularly in West Bengal, have demanded intervention. The sootier India. provides support—arms, training, border sanctuaries—for a Bangla Desh liberation army, the more likely it is that the Bangla Desh movement will remain under moderate leadership. Some such aid is already being given. And if a more active Indian role risks war with Pakistan, it would suit some aggressive Indian army commanders just fine.

Yet India failed to extend diplomatic recognition to Bangle. Desh and has moved only slowly and cautiously in giving military assistance. Why? Bangla Desh would have had to have been recognized very quickly, because once the Pakistan army began moving the liberation army collapsed: Only a month after the civil war began, on March 25, the provisional government of Bangla Desh could venture no further into East Pakistan than a mango grove 800 meters from the Indian border. Indian policy makers, whatever their virtues, are not noted for quick decision-making. By late April India would have been recognizing what amounted to a government in exile. And no other countries would have followed suit.

The poor performance of the Bangla Desh leaders and their makeshift liberation movement was a disappointment even to strong Indian sympathisers. Some of them realized that channelling aid to this movement would be far from simple. Giving guns would not be enough. Training and organization are needed. And the Indian army is no great repository of wisdom on the waging of guerrilla wars.

What even of the simple problems, like insuring that guns given to the liberation army don't end up in Communist hands?

Then too, the risk a a full-scale war with Pakistan, which large-scale Indian military assistance might entail, is not to be taken lightly. India probably would win such a war, but it would divert Indian resources from the monumental domestic problems that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was just re-elected to try to solve. And then there's China, which might support Pakistan with more than words. India's mountain passes along the Chinese border may be much better defended now than at the time of the 1962 Sino-Indian border war, but few sane Indians seek a re-match. (Nor, probably, does domestic-oriented China.)

Finally, some Indians are concerned that a new ethnic state of Bangla Desh would provide a potent impetus for independence movements among the many ethnic groups in the patchwork Indian nation.

Red China, the proponent and patron of liberation wars, chose to side verbally with West Pakistan's decidedly unrevolutionary military regime in its suppression of a popular revolution. An outrageous reversal of revolutionary doctrine, or is it? To Chairman Mao, liberation wars are not won by the likes of Sheikh Mujibur and the bourgeois bureaucrats of his Awami League who have led the Bangla Desh movement to date. Why not let the Pakistan army kill off these bourgeois nationalists, the sooner to see them replaced by leftist militants and a "people's war" that follows the gospel of Chairman Mao? That may be a long time corning, for East Pakistan's Communists are still a small force and Peking's policy is to let even approved revolutionaries help themselves. But China is nothing if not patient.

In the meantime China has cemented its friendship with West Pakistan, a valuable national ally as a counterbalance to India (with its Soviet ties) and as a solid link in Peking's chain of contacts with the rest of the noncommunist underdeveloped world. China has given Pakistan large amounts of economic and military assistance over the years, including a $200 million loan late last year, and Peking, like other nations, does not lightly write off such investments.

So China, in the short run, has backed an old friend and picked a winner in the process. And China's longer run options are still open. By the time China is ready to commit itself to a Communist insurgency in East Pakistan the West Pakistanis may already have decided to abandon the area.

The Soviets were openly critical of West Pakistan's actions in East Pakistan and called for an end to the bloodshed. But the reasons probably have much more to do with Soviet friendship with India and hostility to China than with any sense of brotherhood with the Bengalis. And Soviet sympathies have not been so strongly expressed as to ruin relations with West Pakistan.

While From the U.S. . . .

From the United States, silence. And in a situation like this, silence naturally supports the status quo—which is not a Bengal nation. There are probably several reasons: the simple wish to avoid any new foreign entanglements, a fear of reducing U.S. influence in West Pakistan and thus increasing that of the Chinese, a tendency to stick with a country in which the U.S., too, has invested much military and economic aid. Perhaps there's also another, somewhat subliminal, reason. The West Pakistanis, in addition to being a known quantity, are a rather compatible one for U.S. policy makers. Military men with handlebar mustaches and Sandhurst accents run a superficially efficient regime with clear lines of authority. It is a nation that can use American dollars to build impressive dams, train its soldiers to use American weapons and teach its farmers to grow miracle wheat. It's not a mysterious corner of Asia teeming with little black people. When American VIPs go to Pakistan, it's to see parades in Islamabad (in the West), not to see poverty in Dacca (in the East). Lyndon Johnson invited a West Pakistan camel driver to the White House, not a Bengali rickshaw puller.

It's several years too soon to say whether  or not America, China, Russia, India or Pakistan made the right moves in the spring of 1971. But it's at least a reasonable bet that some kind of new nation will evolve in the years to come, when that happens, ambassadors from Washington, Peking, Moscow and Delhi will be standing at attention in Dacca for the singing of the Bangla Desh national anthem, "My Golden Bangla Desh, I Love You." And some ambassadors, of course, will be in better favor than others.

By Peter R. Kann

DACCA, East Pakistan—The doctor sits behind a desk in his street-front office in an East Pakistani town, occasionally glancing out at the road lined with the charred debris and looted shells of shops and homes.

A vehicle with UNICEF markings on its doors but with armed West Pakistani soldiers inside cruises by. Otherwise, the street is all but deserted. The doctor sits in his office only because he has been ordered to. His family is hiding in a village somewhere outside of town. He speaks in a whisper because any passerby could be an informer. At night, when the army goes knocking on doors, he lives with the fear that his name may be on one of its lists.

He whispers of recent events in this town: the streets littered with bloated and decomposing bodies; the burning, looting and raping; and the continuing terror. "We are afraid to speak the truth. Those who speak the truth are punished, and the only punishment is death," he says.

The doctor is an army veteran, which makes him a special target for his former colleagues. But his real crime is being a Bengali in a land of Bengalis that also happens to be part of the map of Pakistan. It is now a land of death and fear.

Causes Washed Away by Blood

It is less than four months since the civil fighting in East Pakistan began, but already the causes of the conflict seem almost academic. Its geographical and historical roots, the legalities and moralities—all seem to have been washed away by blood. No one really knows how many people have been killed in East Pakistan since March 25, but Western diplomats say the minimum is 200,000. The maximum exceeds one million.

The events fall into three stages. The first was a Bengali political movement aimed at ending two decades of economic and political exploitation by the West Pakistanis. It culminated, in March elections, in national political victory for the Bengali Awami League and its platform of greater East Pakistan autonomy. But on March 25 the Pakistan army (an almost entirely West Pakistani institution), fearing that East Pakistan was moving toward independence, cracked down in Dacca, the East Pakistan capital. Bengali students were massacred, politicians were arrested and the Awami League was outlawed.

The second-stage was a fairy-tale few weeks in which the Bengalis proclaimed and celebrated their independence. Some thousands of East Pakistan's non-Bengali minority were killed during this period, in which the army, perhaps overly cautious, remained in the capital and in a number of military camps. But the illusion of independence ended in mid-April when the army emerged to crush the revolution. Tens of thousands of Bengalis were slain as town after town was retaken, burned and looted. There was little military opposition. Some six million Bengalis, most of them from the Hindu minority group that became a special army target, began fleeing into India.

Now the Third Stage

The third and present stage is army occupation—a terrorized Bengali population being ruled by military force and crude police-state tactics. West Pakistan officials say everything is rapidly returning to normal. But the economy is woefully disrupted, factories are idle, schools are closed, roads are mostly empty and towns are largely deserted. Millions of Bengalis, particularly Hindus and middle-class Muslims, are still hiding in the countryside. About 50,000 refugees are still fleeing to India each day. And army rule is being challenged by Bengali guerrilla forces (the Mukti Bahani, or Liberation Army) that seem to have massive support among the Bengali population. The guerrillas are still lacking in training and organization, but supplies and border sanctuaries are being provided by India.

Ten days of traveling across East-Pakistan and talks with scores of diverse people here indicate that the fourth stage eventually will be an independent East Pakistan: Bangla Desh, or Bengal Nation. But clearly much more killing will take place before Bangla Dash comes to pass.

No solution, including independence, holds any bright hopes for East Pakistan's predominantly peasant society, which, in accordance with the Muhammad's Prophet instruction to "go forth and multiply," is propagating itself into starvation. Its 75 million people already are barely subsisting 1,600 to the square mile, and this population will double within 25 years. A half-million Bengalis were killed by a cyclone last fall. A half-million more were born in 87 days. Perhaps only in East Pakistan could a disaster of the cyclone's magnitude be overshadowed by a greater one—this civil war —only six months later.

Primitive Conceptions of Guilt

Poverty, ignorance and frustration have turned this conflict into a Congo as well as an Algeria. Men are killing each other not only in the name of politics but also over race and religion. The Muslim philosophy of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is made more terrible by primitive conceptions of collective guilt.

The army kills Bengalis. The non-Bengali minority of about two million (commonly called Biharis) backs the army. So Bengalis kill Biharis. The army and the Biharis see this as ample reason to butcher more Bengalis. The Hindu minority of about 10 million becomes a convenient army scapegoat, and even some Bengali Muslims can be persuaded to join in their slaughter. Amid this chaos, various villages, gangs and individuals have been attacking each other for economic gain or to settle private scores.

These are the tales of some of the people encountered on a trip through East Pakistan. As with the doctor, the names of Bengalis and the towns in which they live are omitted. Bengalis, in talking to a reporter, fear for their lives. Most don't talk at all; in some towns not even beggars will approach a stranger. Normally among the world's most voluble people, the Bengalis now talk mostly with their eyes—eyes that look away in fear or-that stare down in shame or that try to express meanings in furtive glances.

A lawyer and his sons have been fortunate. When one asks a Bengali how he is these days, he replies, "I am alive." The lawyer and his sons not only are alive but are living in their own home. They are also hiding in their own home, for they leave it only rarely. "It is too easy to be arrested on the street," the lawyer says. "A seven-year-old can point a finger at me and call me a miscreant, and I will be taken away."

[....]

By Peter R. Kann

DACCA, East Pakistan — An independent East Pakistan seems to be one of those ideas whose time is coming.

Travels across the ravaged land and talks with military participants in the civil conflict, its innocent sufferers and its diplomatic observers leave the distinct impression that someday East Pakistan and West Pakistan will be separate legally as well as ideologically. How soon Bangla Desh, or Bengal nation, comes to pass—and the diplomatic assessments tend to be in terms of years, not months—depends on many factors. These include the degree of support India is willing to give the liberation forces, the weight of economic pressures on West Pakistan, the severity of future famine in East Pakistan and perhaps the policies of America and other world powers.

For the moment, both the Pakistan army and the Bengali independence movement seem to be overly optimistic about their capabilities and prospects. The army, currently running East Pakistan as a kind of reconquered colony, says everything is under control and is rapidly returning to normal. But all around is evidence of social chaos, economic collapse, public hostility, and gradually mounting guerrilla opposition.

Guerrilla Warfare and Patience

Bengali liberation forces still talk of massive offensives that will "liberate" the land as early as this fall, or of the Indian army coming to their aid, or of the Pakistan army simply tiring and going away. But the Pakistan army, tough and tenacious, seems determined to hold on here at all costs. The Indians, while aiding the Bengali resistance, seem anxious to avoid full-scale war. Many Bengalis don't seem to comprehend that guerrilla war, which they are beginning to wage with some effectiveness, is their only hope and that it requires much time and patience.

The fighting began March 25 with attacks by the Pakistan army on civilians in Dacca. The amount of blood that has been spilled in East Pakistan since then appears to rule out any sort of political compromise. Diplomats say that a minimum of 200,000 and perhaps as many as a million people have been killed in four months, most of them Bengali civilians slain by the Pakistan army. Six million refugees have fled to India, and millions more are displaced persons still hiding within East Pakistan.

In the view of nearly all observers here, much more blood will flow, many more villages will be destroyed and many more people will be uprooted before the conflict ends.

If the war does result in Bangla Desh, America may be in trouble. By continuing to supply aid—and particularly arms—to the central government of Pakistan, the U.S. is increasingly coming to be viewed as an enemy by the Bengali people. Moreover, the longer the Pakistan army is able to maintain its hold on East Pakistan, the more likely it is that the Bengali independence movement will slip under Communist influence.

A Problem for India

This is one of the worries that lead some Indian policy makers to favor war with Pakistan. The odds are still against a full-scale war, but artillery exchanges erupt daily along the border. Presidential adviser Henry Kissinger, during recent meetings with American officials in Islamabad, the national Pakistan capital located in the West, is said to have called the odds for an Indo-Pakistani war better than one in three.

The scope of the Pakistan army's military problem here can be seen in a comparison with Vietnam. There, a million-man South Vietnamese army plus American troops and massive firepower must try to control a population of 17 million, many basically sympathetic to the government. Here, only 60,000 West Pakistani troops are trying to control a thoroughly hostile population of 75 million. East Pakistan, moreover, is surrounded on three sides by India, which is giving sanctuaries and supplies to the guerrillas. And the Pakistan army's supply routes from West Pakistan to the East must circumvent, by sea and air, 1,200 miles of India.

Of course, the Mukti Bahani, or liberation army, isn't the Vietcong. For one thing, the guerrillas aren't Communist. For another, they are not—or are not yet—very effective fighters. They have been at it for less than four months, and organization and discipline don't come naturally to most Bengalis.

Learning to Be Guerrillas 

But they are learning. In recent weeks they have been concentrating on disrupting the Pakistan army's lines of transportation; bridges are being dynamited and railroad tracks sabotaged. The key railroad line from Chittagong, East Pakistan's major port, to Dacca, its capital, has been put out of operation, and almost all supplies must move inland by riverboat. Electric power facilities in Dacca and elsewhere have been blasted. The guerrillas also are concentrating on assassinations of local people who collaborate with the army.

The Mukti Bahani enjoys some big advantages, though it is far from ready to benefit fully from them. Much of the land, outside the towns and off the main roads, is a vacuum that 60,000 soldiers can never hope to fill. At night the Pakistan army withdraws into military camps, but if and when the guerrillas learn how to use mortars and rockets, these camps could become traps rather than refuges.

The Pakistan army's crude and bloody tactics, while cowing most Bengalis, have been solidifying public support behind the independence movement and have left the Mukti Bahani with a sea of sympathizers in which to swim.

[....]

By Peter R. Kann

ISLAMABAD, West Pakistan—The government of Pakistan, seeking to repress an independence struggle by the 75 million Bengalis of East Pakistan, has several options—all of them bad.

It can press ahead with its policy of armed and bloody repression, which, in the view of almost all foreign observers—though not of Pakistan's military junta—is eventually bound to fail, draining West Pakistan in the process.

It can precipitate, or be provoked into, a war with neighboring India, a war Pakistan is almost sure to lose.

It can admit the ultimate hopelessness of holding East Pakistan and withdraw, thereby discrediting the Pakistani army, setting off centrifugal pressures among ethnic minorities in West Pakistan and ending Pakistan's pretensions of rivaling India as a power on the subcontinent.

A fourth possibility—peaceful political accommodation between the government and the East Pakistanis—is considered an impossibility by nearly all observers. Too much blood has flowed; too much bitterness remains.

Best Bet: More Repression

Ten days of talks and travels here in West Pakistan indicate that the first option, continued repression, is most likely to be pursued. The third option, withdrawal, is considered least likely. But the second option, war with India, remains a very real danger—one that would affect not only India and Pakistan but also the world powers lined up behind them.

It has been nearly six months since the Pakistani civil war began with army attacks in Dacca, the East Pakistani capital, and by now the results are well-known: several hundred thousand Bengali civilians dead; massive physical destruction and economic dislocation in East Pakistan; eight million Bengali refugees crammed into Indian border camps; Indian support (arms, training, sanctuaries) for the Mukti Bahini guerrilla forces in East Pakistan, and frequent shellings and other border incidents between Pakistani and Indian military forces.

And for nearly six months now, there has been talk of war in both Islamabad and New Delhi.

Diplomats in both capitals believe that neither country currently wants a full-scale war. But that doesn't mean there won't be one. The almost daily border incidents provide the running risk of miscalculation and escalation. A potentially severe famine in East Pakistan this fall could send millions of additional refugees streaming into India and set off an irresistible public war clamor.

Who Will Make the Amputation?

And, in the longer run, observers here see the danger of a desperate, beleaguered Pakistani government finally realizing the inevitability of losing East Pakistan and preferring—for domestic political reasons—to lose it by way of war with India. "There may well come a point when amputation by India seems more politically palatable to the Pakistanis than performing surgery on themselves," one envoy here says.

At this stage, however, desperation isn't the mood of West Pakistan.

For one thing, this newly constructed capital with its empty eight-lane boulevards and gleaming white government buildings is even further removed from the packed paddy land, the death, hatred and fear of East Pakistan than is indicated by the more than 1,000 miles that separate West Pakistan from East Paki-stan. This is an autocratic society in which decisions are made by a handful of generals at the top. While to some extent they may be victims of their own propaganda on the situation in the East, they firmly believe they are following the path of righteousness in preserving the unity of Pakistan and perhaps the purity of the Muslim religion.

Spoon-Feeding Propaganda

As for the other 50 million West Pakistanis, they are spoon-fed an information diet consisting of accounts of military successes, diatribes against Bengali "miscreants" and Indian troublemakers, and assurances that all is under control. But, ignorant or informed, they would probably agree with their leaders' policies.

And, while the civil war isn't going nearly so well for the army as people here are told and while it may well be hopeless for the army in the long run, in the short term the army has succeeded in reasserting control over much of East Pakistan. The Mukti Bahini guerrillas need more arms, training and experience. In the view of most observers on the scene, Bangla Desh (the Bengal nation) will be years, rather than months, in the making.

Some effects of the civil war have been felt here, and while the economic ones in particular may be serious, they aren't yet considered severe enough to translate into political pressures that an authoritarian government has to worry much about. "This government may turn out to be brittle, but it still seems strong," a Western diplomat says.

Economically the civil war's effects are showing here in some rising prices and scattered factory layoffs as well as in a much-reduced international credit rating. But, given the fact that East Pakistan's economy is a shambles both as a producer of raw materials (and thus of foreign exchange) and as a captive market for West Pakistan's manufactured goods, the surprising thing to most observers is that West Pakistan's economy is still functioning reasonably well.

The government has at least postponed severe economic troubles with an anti-inflationary program, a unilateral moratorium on foreign-debt payments and some skillful export promotion in the Middle East. Dwindling foreign-exchange reserves, sharp inflation and widespread unemployment may be inevitable costs of the civil war, economists say, but no for another six months to a year. "There's still a lot of fat in this economy that hasn't been pared yet," a Western economic analyst asserts.

Coffins and condolence letters are steadily trickling back here from the eastern front, and their effect is certainly being felt, particularly in the traditional military recruiting grounds of the north Punjab plain and in the sunbaked villages of the North-West Frontier. But the reac-tion in these areas is said to be that men have always died in wars and the only answer is to kill more Bengalis in return.

"I finally heard a Pakistani army officer say they are committing genocide in East Pakistan," an American woman living here says.

Was he upset about it she is asked?

"Oh, no. He said they should be doing more of it," she replies.

The Policy Is Repression

In a recent television interview, Pakistan's president, Gen. Yahya Khan, asked. "How can a government repress its own people?" How absurd an idea. he meant to say. But brutal repression is a Pakistan army policy. In the East, the question is real, not rhetorical.

The people of the West and of the East are different in nearly every respect. To a tall, tan-skinned Punjabi from an area in the West where life is a perennial struggle to coax a bit of wheat out of the arid soil, the small, dark Bengali of the East, waist-deep in his rice paddy is more strange creature than fellow citizen. All that tied the two together when Pakistan was formed 23 years ago was the Muslim religion and a common hatred or fear of Hindu India. That common denominator couldn't outweigh the differences.

It is a truism to say that life is cheap in Asia. And when a cyclone killed several hundred thousand Bengalis last fall, even the Bengalis in Dacca, only a hundred miles away from the disaster area, were largely unconcerned: people in West Pakistan were even less so. In the same sense, the present plight of the Bengalis is hardly pulling at Punjabi heartstrings.

Even among many of the more sophisticated West Pakistanis, there is an attitude of indifference and cynicism toward the Bengalis. "Spindly little low-caste Hindu converts," is the definition of one British-educated colonel. "The problem is that there are too many of them (Bengalis)," a wealthy Karachi businessman says. "If you fire a bullet here in West Pakistan, you'll hit a tree or maybe a bird. But in East Pakistan a stray bullet kills 17 Bengalis." (Of course, this avoids the issue, be-cause most bullets fired by the army in East Pakistan haven't been stray and most of the brutality hasn't been random.)

A West Pakistani "dove" is a man who says that East Pakistan is poor, overpopulated and problem-ridden—a perpetual drain on West Pakistani development with or without civil war—and that West Pakistan would be better off without it.

And indeed a good case can be made for West Pakistan's going it alone. While the West has depended upon, and exploited, the East's economy for more than two decades, the West probably could do well enough on its own, as the current lack of economic crisis here indicates. Economists consider West Pakistan far more developable than the East with its Malthusian population pressures. And some West Pakistanis agree that ethnically and geographically West Pakistan's future should logically lie with the Middle East rather than East Asia.

Dilemmas of a "Dove"

But the thought of a truncated Pakistan, a nation of 50 million instead of 125 million, a small western neighbor of India instead of a power able to challenge Indian hegemony on the subcontinent—all this is too much for even the "doves" to accept.

Moreover, people here say withdrawal from East Pakistan would have domestic as well as international repercussions West Pakistan's mincrities—Pathans, Sindis, Baluchis— all are chafing to some extent under Punjabi domination. The Baluchis and Pathans are tribal people who for years have sporadically engaged in armed uprisings against the government. Not long ago, for example, some 3,000 armed Pathans came down out of the rugged mountains along the Afghanistan frontier to challenge 1,-000 Pakistani policemen over an issue of land title.

And the government recently saw fit to arrest a leading Pathan politician suspected of pushing a Pathan independence movement. So granting independence to the Bengalis could spur similar pressures among groups here in the West, the government fears and diplomats agree. (It could also set off pressures among Bengalis and other ethnic groups in India—a danger that some Indian officials, despite their public championing of Bangla Desh, are well aware of.)

Discrediting the Army

Abandoning East Pakistan under guerrilla pressure would also discredit the Pakistani army, generally considered the only viable institution in the country. West Pakistan is an area with martial traditions dating back through the British Indian Empire to the time of the Mogul conquerors, but as a nation it hasn't any political traditions at all.

“Defeat for the Pakistani army would have incalculable effects here because the army is what holds this society together. Discredit the army and there is no telling what forces would be let loose. It wouldn't just be like Dien Bien Phu, pinning ribbons of glorious defeat on the regimental banners and marching home," a longtime Western resident says.

So some West Pakistanis believe they must continue the war of repression because it is a righteous cause and because it will succeed. And other West Pakistanis believe they must persist with a policy that may fail. The immediate effect on the Bengalis, of course, is the same.

But in the process, the Pakistan government is showing some signs of pragmatism in tactics if not in strategy.

There is an increased awareness here of the importance of world public opinion and the need for international support. The government is even trying to maintain friendly relations with Russia, which recently signed a defense treaty with India. And while the weight of world opinion isn't strong enough to make the Pakistan government stop killing Bengalis, diplomats believe it will restrain the government from executing Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Bengali leader on trial for treason. The trial verdict is hardly in doubt since President Yahya has already branded Mujib a traitor, but execution would further alienate Pakistan's aid donors and would increase war fever in India.

Realism at the Top

The government here also is said to be realistic, at least at the top level, about its prospects in a war with India. While army officers tend to say—and probably believe —that one Muslim soldier is the equal of any 10 Hindus, the leadership is thought to be aware of less subjective military realities. India's 900,000-man army not only is twice the size of Pakistan's but also is generally considered to have more modern and more ample weaponry. And, unlike Pakistan, India by now has a defense industry that makes it self-sufficient in a variety of arms and equipment.

In 1965 the two nations fought an 18-day war that left Pakistan totally exhausted and India almost so. Military analysts think both nations could fight a bit longer now, but they say Pakistan would almost surely tire first.

Thus, at least so long as the Pakistan government believes it can hang onto East Pakistan, there is good reason for it to avoid a war with India. And thus, for all the tough talk in Islamabad, the government has resisted the provocation of India's open support for the Mukti Bahini. "We have played it cool," says a senior official of the foreign ministry in Islamabad.

Western diplomats also believe the Pakistan government has finally been convinced of the seriousness of the food situation in East Pakistan. Subduing the Bengalis may still be a much higher priority than feeding them, but diplomats believe Pakistan is anxious to avoid the severe sort of famine that would send millions more refugees spilling across the Indian border. "If they (Pakistan) can't feed East Pakistan, we will," an American diplomat says. "The U.S. has made a national decision that it will solve the food problem there." But such a decision, by Pakistan or the 'U.S., may prove difficult to implement, given the badly damaged transportation system and continuing military activity in the East.

Further Indications of Pragmatism

Other signs of pragmatism, or even moderation, that diplomats point to include an offer by President Yahya to hold talks with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the recent appointment of a civilian governor in East Pakistan to replace tough General Tikka Khan, agreement to permit a limited number of United Nations relief workers into East Pakistan, and willingness to permit UN peace observers in East Pakistan if India agreed to permit them on her side of the border. The proposals for peace observers as well as for Yahya-Gandhi talks were rejected by India.

(When President Yahya was asked by a re-porter for the French paper Le Figaro what he would say to Mrs. Gandhi in such a meeting, he is reported to have replied: "I would say to her, 'Shut up, woman. Leave me alone and let my refugees come back.' " But, for all his military bluntness, President Yahya is considered something of a moderate among his military peers. To his right are men like Tikka Khan, who, according to a Westerner who knows him, "says collective punishment like you or I say good morning.")

Some of these small signs of reasonableness by the government here may be attributable to American influence—or so say U.S. officials. By continuing to permit Pakistan to import American military equipment licensed prior to March 25, by continuing economic aid to Pakistan and by avoiding any public condemnation of Pakistan's treatment of the Bengalis, the U.S. has retained a measure of leverage in Islamabad. The price paid for this leverage has been deterioration of American relations with India, where the U.S. is widely regarded as an ally of Pakistan and thus an enemy of India.

Whatever leverage the U.S. has here (and officials admit it is limited) hasn't been enough to make Pakistan recognize responsibility for the roughly eight million Bengali refugees now in India. President Yahya recently claimed that there are only two million real refugees, that the rest are Indian paupers whom Paki-stan would never take back. The implication, at least to the Indians, is that Pakistan may someday be prepared to accept the return of about two million Muslim refugees but will close its borders to the six million refugees who are Hindus.

If India considers America an outright ally of Pakistan, so do some Pakistanis—and this makes American officials uncomfortable. "Some Pakistanis have the idea we are going to back them up in a war against India. We are trying to dissuade them of that notion," one diplomat explains. Still, the frontier city of Peshawar is rife with rumors that America is about to reopen an air base that was closed down several years ago. And if there is an Indo-Pakistani war in which the U.S stands on the sidelines calling for peace (as it would likely do), there could well be anti-American protests here as well as in India.

Internally, President Yahya still talks of turning over power to elected civilian leaders, but few diplomatic observers believe it can be done within the four-month time limit the president promised in a speech June 26 And most diplomats think that if and when the turnover takes place, the generals will retain a considerable share of political power.

It was the national elections for a constituent assembly early this year that led to the civil war, since the Bengali Awami League won a majority of seats on a platform of East Pakistan autonomy that the generals weren't prepared to accept. Army arrests of Awami League leaders and attacks on Awami League followers on March 25 constituted the opening round of civil hostilities. Some generals now blame President Yahya and his promises of democracy for having caused the whole civil crisis.

The government has declared a partial amnesty for elected representatives from East Pakistan who have taken refuge in India. But the Awami League, along with its program, remains outlawed, and few Awami League representatives have returned.

In the West the leading politician is Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, long considered pro-Chinese and anti-American. These days, at least to an American newsman, he talks in moderate tones about his daughter at Radcliffe, his friendship for America, his interest in peace and the benefits of Swedish-style socialism. 

The Views of Bhutto

Mr. Bhutto says he recently told President Yahya: "If you don't turn over power within four months, don't bother turning it over at all. Then you keep Pakistan for as long as it lasts." Mr. Bhutto believes that he could stop the "exploitation" of the East Pakistanis and reach a political settlement with them. But diplomats here doubt that Mr. Bhutto is in any position to issue ultimatums to President Yahya or that Mr. Bhutto, any more than President Yahya, could reach a political compromise with the Bengalis. The general view is that the Bengalis by now will settle for nothing less than total independence.

In any case, Mr. Bhutto may not get the chance to try. A number of observers believe the military leaders will engineer a coalition among three conservative Muslim League parties that could be more trusted to manage affairs along lines the military approves of.

While the economic situation is considerably less critical than Western analysts would have predicted five months ago, one cost that is hard to compute is the civil war's effect on West Pakistan's long-term development. Development planning, as well as spending, appears to be close to a standstill, and that may have serious effects in years to come.

Another unknown in the economic picture is the price that would have to be paid to put East Pakistan's shattered economy back together, to rebuild its devastated towns and to relieve the misery of its people. It is a price Pakistan may never have to pay. But an independent Bangla Desh won't be able to afford it either.

By Peter R. Kann

DACCA, East Pakistan — This city, where death and disaster have become a way of life, is abnormally tense and grim and is gripped with talk of full-scale war between Pakistan and India.

This week the Pakistani government proclaimed a state of national emergency, apparently applicable to West Pakistan as well as East Pakistan. But here in the East, the move was largely rhetorical. An emergency situation, under full martial law, has existed here ever since civil war erupted in Pakistan eight months ago.

Whatever the status of the Indian-Pakistani clashes, the current events unquestionably represent an escalation in the rhetoric of war. And that in itself is significant. Pakistan has tended to downplay previous Indian border incursions. Its eagerness to publicize the current clashes and the declaration of a national emergency may indicate that Pakistan's patience is really at an end. Or it may represent a final Pakistani effort to panic the major powers into pressuring India toward compromise.

Rhetoric and Reality

At any rate, rhetoric does affect reality on this subcontinent: The war of words heightens the war of nerves—and nerves can only stretch so taut before they snap. Thus, if the current fighting doesn't precipitate a full-scale war, the odds are high that the next clash—or the next —will. And a 1971 or 1972 Indo-Pakistani conflict would probably be longer and bloodier than the 1965 war, which lasted only two weeks and left both nations exhausted.

Analysts say both countries are considerably stronger than they were in 1965; India is believed to be less amenable any international calls for a cease-fire; a war now would see heavy fighting on both the eastern and the western fronts rather than only in the West as in 1965, and the bitter civil war raging in East Pakistan adds a bloody new dimension.

The great irony of all this is that the cause of war would be East Pakistan—a land that all logic dictates neither Pakistan nor India should want to have or should want to go to war over. East Pakistan always seemed a land of despair—plagued by Malthusian population pressures (75 million people in an area the size of Arkansas), staggering poverty, Biblical-scale natural disasters, dying industries, and primitive racial and religious passions. The massive, violent upheavals of the last six months have ren-dered East Pakistan's future bleaker still, to the point that some observers here see the land sinking into some sort of ungovernable, unsalvageable, almost primeval chaos.

But, whatever logic might dictate, logic has never been the decisive factor in the politics of the subcontinent. East Pakistan's orgy of vio-lence has pitted not only the army against Ben-galis, but Bengalis against non-Bengalis, Mos-lems against Hindus, villages against villages, gangs against gangs, and one desperate man against the other.

The Roots of the Crisis

The real roots of the current crisis are sunk deep in the poverty, misery and frustrations, the prejudices and passions not only of East Pakistan but also of the entire subcontinent.

The immediate progression of political events leading to crisis began last March when the Pakistani army, which dominates the country, attempted to suppress, by force, the Awami League of East Pakistan, which had just wen a national election on a platform of greater East Pakistani autonomy.

The Bengalis of East Pakistan might have been satisfied with greater autonomy or might have moved toward secession, but the Pakistani army action decided the issue. The Bengalis proclaimed Bangla Desh (the Bengal nation), and for a few weeks last spring it was a partial reality. Then the Pakistani army moved to crush the independence movement. Several hundred thousand Bengalis, at least, are believed to have been slaughtered under a calculated army policy of collective guilt.

Some 10 million refugees flooded into India —the majority of them from East Pakistan's Hindu minority which became a special army scapegoat. Many millions more became displaced persons within East Pakistan, fleeing from village to village in mass terror. The Pakistani army succeeded in reestablishing its rule in the areas its guns could reach.

Guerrilla War in the East

Meanwhile, just across the borders of India, which all but [?] East Pakistan, the Indian army was providing arms, training and sanctuaries to the Mukti Bahini, or Bengali liberation army. And in the course of the last six months, the Muktis have been mounting an increasingly effective guerrilla war within East Pakistan. Foreign analysts here still consider the Muktis no match for the Pakistani army in a real military confrontation, but the Muktis, with widespread popular support within East Pakistan, have spread insurgency across the land.

Dacca diplomats believe the Muktis are in outright control of about 25% of the thanas (subdistricts) of East Pakistan, and much of the rest of the land would have to be considered "contested." There are gunfights and explosions in Dacca almost every night, and one diplomat tells of being halted by a Mukti unit on a main city street one night earlier this week. “Where the army is not, Bangla Desh now is," a Western diplomat says.

Of course, much of the Muktis' success can be attributed to the threat of Indian invasion from across the borders. The Pakistani army has only about 75,000 troops in East Pakistan, and the great majority of them are strung out along the borders facing the Indian army rather than fighting insurgents in the interior.

Indo-Pakistani border incidents have broken out sporadically ever since March, but these have gradually escalated from random mortarings to protracted artillery exchanges, from small cross-border raids to bigger battles. Diplomats and their relatively impartial observers in both Pakistan and India say that while the Pakistanis certainly have launched some small, cross-border forays into India, most of the border fighting has been initiated by India. Because of their relative military weakness, Pakistani troops still appear to be under orders not to counterattack into Indian territory.

The Pakistanis would seem to have less reason to provoke a war, if only because they are far more likely to lose. Beneath the surface bravado of the Pakistani generals ("one Muslim soldier is worth 100 Hindus" and so on), the grim military realities seem to have sunk in.

India's military forces total about one million men, Pakistan's about 400,000. India's air force and armor units are larger and better-equipped than Pakistan's. India has a diversified domestic defense industry that makes it self-sufficient in various types of arms and ammunition; Pakistan is much more dependent on foreign suppliers. India has a solid ally (at least as arms supplier and political supporter) in the Soviet Union; Pakistan has a somewhat more fragile friendship with China and a very tenuous one with America.

Pakistan's supply lines, between the West and the East, must circumvent, by sea or air, 1,200 miles of India. And, of course, in East Pakistan the troops along the border have the guerrillas—and an overwhelmingly hostile Bengali population—to their rear. Bridges are blown daily in East Pakistan, and the army already is having problems moving supplies from Dacca to the field.

It isn't surprising, then, that the Pakistanis have been showing a measure of military restraint and even appear interested, at least from time to time, in some face-saving escape from their dilemma. Pakistan President Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan has offered direct talks with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ("How can I shake hands with a clenched fist?" is Mrs. Gandhi's reply). He has agreed to the idea of United Nations border observers (India has rejected the idea). And he has privately expressed a willingness for political compromise with the Bengalis (the Bengalis might have accepted the offer in March but won't or cannot, accept now).

Such moves by President Yahya Khan, at this stage, seem to be viewed by the Indians and the Muktis as simply a sign of weakness, which is probably an accurate view.

"The Indians are squeezing Pakistan, trying to provoke them," one Western diplomat here says. "The Indians figure that the Pakistanis will just continue to take it or they can be pressured to settle on Indian terms—or they can go to war—which India wouldn't mind." India, he is saying, seems to hold all the cards.

The Pakistanis, of course, haven't made the one seemingly logical move that would avert full-scale war: to grant the Bengalis their independence and withdraw. Some West Pakistanis will privately admit that East Pakistan has become a terrible liability, that repression cannot in the long run succeed, that the East is simply a drain on West Pakistani lives and and that the hatreds now run too deep for a political solution short of independence.

But even if this were the view of President Yahya Khan and his fellow generals (and that probably isn't the case), Pakistan cannot simply let go of the tiger's tail. To abandon East Pakistan to the Muktis would discredit the Pakistani army (and the Pakistani government, which is basically the same thing) and probably set off political chaos in West Pakistan. "The army simply cannot afford to be defeated by what they have been calling a bunch of cowardly little Bengali monkeys," a European envoy says. "The credibility of a military government depends on the credibility of its army. And once that credibility is gone, there is nothing left of Pakistan."

Thus, some observers believe that faced with grim alternatives, the army might prefer to lose East Pakistan by way of war with India rather than to gradual guerrilla gains.

Simple logic, of course, would seem to dictate against India's going to war.

A full-scale war, even if India "won" it, would leave India as well as Pakistan exhausted. And India can ill afford to expend energy or resources on anything other than its crying domestic needs. The Pakistani army is a tough fighting force and might hold the Indians to a bloody stalemate on the western front though losing in the East. And independent Bangla Desh, if one emerged from a war, would encourage breakaway pressures in adjacent Indian West Bengal. Setting up a functioning Bangla Desh government would probably present [?] problems to the Indians, who themselves would be outsiders here, and both the finances and the politics of that could overtax Indian capabilities.

But powerful pressures are pushing India toward war. There is frustration at the continuing cost of caring for 10 million refugees, and there is worry over the disruption the refugees are causing in eastern Indian states. There is concern that the longer the East Pakistani civil war goes on, the more likely it is that militants, unsympathetic to India, will take control of the Mukti movement. There is a feeling that India now has a golden opportunity to humble her traditional enemy and reduce it to the status of a small western neighbor. There is strong public and political pressure on Mrs. Gandhi to "do something" about the East Pakistan situation, partly perhaps because the Indian government encouraged overly optimistic expectations as to Mukti Bahini prospects in the early days of the conflict.

Mrs. Gandhi's need for a "full solution" to the East Pakistan issue is all the greater because her Congress Party faces state elections in February. Finally, the Indian-Soviet treaty of cooperation, signed in April, appears to have emboldened India, making her less fearful of Chinese intervention in the event of war. Ironically, Western diplomats tend to believe that one Soviet aim, in signing the treaty was to restrain India from war.

By Peter R. Kann

DACCA, East Pakistan — From an upper-story window in the Hotel Intercontinental here, one could look out and see the Indian MIGs making almost hourly rocket runs on Dacca airport a mile or so away.

The blue sky sporadically was sprinkled with tiny white clouds from Pakistani antiaircraft fire. Several pillars of black smoke rose from the direction of the airport—Indian rockets that found a flammable target or the burning wreckage of the Indian planes that were shot down in the first morning of the war.

It was like watching an old World War II movie in three-dimensional color and Cinemascope, with the sky as the wide screen.

Full-scale war clearly was here. It had been coming with a kind of inexorable illogic ever since the East Pakistani civil conflict began last March 25. The real roots of the war, of course, are buried 25 years deep in the history of Indo-Pakistani hostility. From this vantage point and at this stage, it is impossible to say which side started the full-scale war. Perhaps there will never be an undebated answer.

The Indian Escalation

Clearly, however, India had been deliberately escalating its attacks along East Pakistan's frontiers in the last two weeks, and the line between limited war and full-scale war had become increasingly fuzzy. Because of internal political pressures or because of the burden of 10 million East Pakistan refugees, India perhaps felt it necessary to bring the nine-month-old crisis to a final military conclusion.

Perhaps Pakistan, for reasons of its own internal politics and military prestige, felt it could no longer submit to Indian border pres-sures. Or maybe the Pakistani army, surveying the state of the bloody civil war in East Pakistan, decided it is better to fight an "honorable" war with the Indian army than to be gradually drained dry by the Bengali guerrillas.

One group that may not be entirely pleased with the present situation is the East Pakistani guerrillas, or Mukti Bahini. The guerrillas had been making rapid gains in recent weeks as the Pakistani army was tied down along the borders by the Indians and prevented from launching large-scale search-and-destroy operations against guerrillas in the interior. If Bangla Desh (the Bengal Nation) is soon to be born, it will very obviously be by Indian midwifery.

Ironically, India appeared well on its way toward achieving its aims—creation of Bangla Desh, dismemberment of Pakistan and supremacy on the subcontinent—without the need for full-scale war.

Pessimism About Pakistan

No foreign observers here appear optimistic about the Pakistani army's prospects against India on the East Pakistan front. Only about 70,000 regular Pakistani troops are in East Pakistan. Even before full-scale war began, they were facing serious supply problems. Now, resupply and reinforcement from West Pakistan seem almost out of the question. They also face the Mukti Bahini and an overwhelmingly hostile Bengali population to their rear. The Indians have supremacy in manpower and firepower, and India has the geographic advantage of surrounding East Pakistan on three sides; the fourth frontier is the Bay of Bengal.

If only because of geography, the Pakistani army can be expected to offer determined resistance. Said the commander of Pakistani forces in the East last week: "They will have to go over our bodies. Three to one doesn't bother me. I am so happy—there are more of them to kill."

[Yesterday, the Indian army claimed that it had almost isolated East Pakistan and that West Pakistani troops there were retreating in disarray, the Associated Press reported. West Pakistan disputed the claims. Also yesterday, the U.S. said it suspended economic aid to India; see story on page 3.3.]

Brave rhetoric or plain bravery notwithstanding, diplomats here figure that most of East Pakistan could be taken by a determined Indian onslaught in two to three weeks. On the West Pakistani front, where Pakistan has most of its troops and its most modern weaponry, the expert guessers talk of a bloody stalemate, with Pakistan picking up some bits of Indian territory and India some bits of West Pakistan.

The last Indo-Pakistani war, in 1965, lasted only two weeks and left both nations exhausted. Both are stronger now, and this year's war could last longer. But however it ends, it will further retard the desperately needed development of these poor nations.

War may well be a greater tragedy than the sort of demiwar that has been waged here in recent months, but to many foreign observers here, there Seems to be a sense of relief that the fuse has finally reached its end.

That doesn't mean, however, that any quick solution is likely to the spiral of violence East Pakistan's civil war set in motion. Whatever Bangla Dash government eventually emerges here would probably play host to a new round of massacres—this time Bengalis slaughtering non-Bengali army collaborators.

Whether any government can really rule this land remains very much in doubt. Still, a "real” war with tank battles and jet sorties and divisional fronts offers at least the illusion of some sort of solution. On this subcontinent even optimistic illusions are hard to come by.

Accurate war news is almost impossible to come by, too. The Hotel Intercontinental took on a kind of crisis conviviality at one point as rumors of all kinds spread. One favorite on Sunday morning was that the Indian army had pushed to within 60 miles of Dacca. This was alarming news—until someone finally stopped to check a map and discovered that at several places the Indian border lies fewer than 60 miles from Dacca.

Early this week with Dacca blacked out at night, correspondents clustered by candlelight around shortwave radios to listen to the latest exaggerations on Indian and Pakistani broadcasts. Even the precise time on Sunday morning when Dacca airport was first bombed remained in some doubt because the various clocks at the Intercontinental Hotel are never synchronized.

By day Dacca appeared largely deserted. Most Bengalis remained indoors, although some appeared on street corners or rooftops to catch a glimpse of the spectacle. Traffic in this seedy city of one million population seemed reduced to occasional military vehicles and the ever-intrepid rickshaw peddlers. Some of the military vehicles had been garlanded with palm leaves in an effort at camouflage, and some city policemen were wearing a few leaves on their heads, presumably so that Indian pilots would mistake them for bushes.

But as of early this week, the only Dacca targets for Indian air strikes had been the airfield and the military base just beyond it. And up to then, it still seemed more like a war movie than a war.

By Peter R. Kann

SIBALAY, East Pakistan—The logistics life-line of Pakistani forces in East Pakistan is a slender and fraying thread.

Pakistani commanders in Dacca openly admit that they are cut off from West Pakistan, which is 1,000 miles away as the plane flies. Indian ships control the seas, and Indian planes dominate the skies here. And scant supplies are reaching Pakistani troops from what limited stockpiles the army has available in Dacca and other supply centers here in East Pakistan.

It is the supply problem even more than India's heavy superiority in manpower and firepower that seems to make defeat all but inevitable for Pakistani forces here in East Pakistan.

As of midweek, diplomatic observers here saw the military situation "coming apart faster than we anticipated." The heavily defended city of Jessore near the border between East Pakistan and West Bengal has fallen to the Indians. And the latest reports from Indian spokesmen say their troops are closing in on Dacca.

East Pakistan is a land whose geography would tax the capabilities of even the best-equipped army. There aren't many roads here to begin with, and seldom can you travel five miles on the few roads there are without running into an impassable stretch. In the rainy season, much of this land is a lake. In the dry season—which is now—much of it is a mud flat.

Of Bridges, Ferries & Bombs

The smaller bodies of water are spanned by bridges, but many bridges have been blown up by Mukti Bahini (East Pakistani) guerrillas in recent months. The big rivers are traversed by ferries, but many of the ferries have been put out of commission by Indian bombers in recent days.

The rivers themselves in some cases can serve as highways but generally flow north and south, not east and west to the battlefronts. Boats are slow, big ones are In short supply and many are vulnerable to air attack.

Of course, the same geographic obstacles plaguing the Pakistani army can be expected to hamper the Indian army as it attempts to move toward Dacca. But the Indians are at least well-equipped. Sibalay, 50 miles west of Dacca, is the ferry station on the east bank of the giant Jamuna River. As such, Sibalay is the narrow funnel through which must pass supplies and reinforcements for much of the Pakistani army fighting to the west of the river.

A day on the road between Dacca and Siba-lay offers some indications of how serious the army's supply problems are. To reach Sibalay from Dacca, one must cross at least a dozen bridges and negotiate two ferry crossings. Three of the bridges are in various states of disrepair because of guerrilla sabotage. Two have gaping holes but can be crossed with the aid of planks. The third can be circumvented by wading across the stream.

Surviving a Jet Attack

At the first ferry crossing, a small convoy of army trucks camouflaged with leaves and branches is waiting In line for one small ferry. Six Indian jets suddenly sweep high across the sky. The soldiers flatten themselves on the ground and point their rifles toward the speeding specks. After only a moment of uncertainty, the planes pass on. So eventually does the convoy.

An hour later comes the second small ferry crossing. The ferry here is operating, but an army truck aboard it isn't. The truck, carrying wounded soldiers from the front to Dacca, finally has to be pushed off the ferry by medical corpsmen and by some of the bandaged war-wounded as well. The delay is just a normal one.

Most of the Pakistani army's trucks here seem vintage vehicles. Several small convoys are stalled along the road with overheated radiators or other internal disorders. As one such convoy rolls to an unscheduled stop, the Bengali peasants working fields along the road-side flee in panic. But the army has more crucial tasks these days than running search-and-destroy operations through Bengali villages.

It is another half-hour to Sibalay, a cluster of wooden shacks largely populated, it seems, by professional beggars. The Jamuna, even in the dry season, looks more like an ocean than a river. What looks like the west bank, out near the horizon, is only a sandbar.

Four big vehicular ferries formerly plied the Jamuna from this station, connecting with three different roads on the western bank. But by early this week, Indian airplanes had sunk or otherwise disabled three of the four vessels, and two of the three west-bank landings, were blocked. How long the remaining ferry, despite efforts to camouflage it, could avoid Indian air strikes is a question probably begging for a pessimistic answer. This ferry can make a maximum of three round-trip river crossings a day, and the point at which it deposits troops and supplies on the west bank is still about 100 miles by circuitous road from Jessore.

There are two convoys stalled waiting for this ferry. One contains a rifle company, but the captain in charge is concerned about the security of the road to Jessore once he crosses the river. He says guerrillas are active in that area. The other convoy contains medical corps-men, and their officer says he will worry about one thing at a time, first of all about the river crossing and Indian planes—”99% danger," he says.

Both officers have recently arrived from West Pakistan and are natives of the Punjab, an area Where water is precious. "Bengal is a. bloody ocean," says the captain, using “bloody” in the British, rather than literal, sense.

The medical corps finally decides to go across the river, and so do some venturesome reporters. This one, however, heads back toward Dacca confronting a few logistical problems of his own. The first stage of the return is the triwheel Lambretta, a kind of mini-minibus that holds a handful of people. But it blows a tire.

Luckily, an empty army truck happens along and carries the reporter some miles farther before it, in turn, breaks down. At this point the Lambretta comes limping along past the stalled truck and readmits the reporter.

But on the outskirts of Dacca, the triwheeler develops a new and incurable ailment, and so the last leg of the trip is made by rickshaw and on foot. Those may be the only really reliable modes of transportation in East Pakistan these days.  

By Peter R. Kann

DACCA, East Pakistan—What follows are notes from a diary that I have been keeping since the Indo-Pakistani war broke out Dec. 3. The diary isn't meant to be a history of the war—if only because from here one can see only a very small slice of the conflict engulfing the subcontinent.

Some of the notes are editorial and even somewhat personal, for which I can only offer the excuse that facts are scarce and the situation encourages reflection.

FRIDAY, DEC. 3: Entering elevator in Intercontinental Hotel when another reporter runs up to ask, "Have you heard the war is on?" It's just before 8 p.m. Happen to notice sign by elevator: Happy Hours 6 to 8 p.m. Except Fridays. Rest of evening spent with other journalists clustered around shortwave radio.

Evidently, fighting broke out along border between West Pakistan and India this afternoon. India says Pakistan started it; Pakistan says India. Who knows? But India has been launching limited attacks on East Pakistan border for past 10 days. What are you supposed to do when a war starts and the cable office is closed? Play poker. Go to sleep.

SATURDAY, DEC. 4: Day starts early. About 3 a.m. sky lights up with fantastic fire-works display by Pak antiaircraft batteries out by airport. Indian air raid or jumpy ack-ack gunners? Moot question because by breakfast time, Indian MIGs making regular rocket runs on airfield. Makes you wish you were a photographer. MIGs diving through clear blue sky. Little white puffs from the ack-ack. Even couple of inconclusive dogfights above the hotel. Several Indian planes shot down. But every observer has different count. "Better than Pearl Harbor," one of television types says. Airstrikes continue almost hourly rest of day.

Dacca streets deserted except for few military vehicles with palm leaves and other assorted foliage tied to tops. Policeman down the street also sprouting foliage from his cap. Run into Nepalese consul, dean of diplomatic corps in Dacca. He says he arranged a diplomatic-corps conference on the crisis—but canceled it because of the crisis.

SUNDAY, DEC. 5: Anticlimactic day. Nothing to compare with yesterday's air spectacular. Lots of rumors circulating. One favorite has Indian army columns only 60 miles from Dacca. Someone consults map and discovers Indian border to the east less than 60 miles away. Western families resident in Dacca congregating at Intercontinental. Rumors of planned United Nations relief flight to Bangkok confirmed by UN officials at evening meeting in the bar. A Gregory Peck scene—distinguished gray-haired UN official talking about women and children first. Some of the men buying out hotel bar's scotch supply at $35 a bottle. It's a stockpiling sort of day. "Sartre would dig this place," one reporter says.

Why?

"No exit:"

MONDAY, DEC. 6: Try a road trip to Sibalay about 50 miles west of Dacca. Impression: Pak army bound to lose East Pakistan if only because of logistics. Small army convoys stalled along roadside. Overheated radiators and other mechanical maladies. When convoy stalls, the Bengali farmers flee from nearby fields. Until now, army trucks meant search for Mukti Bahini guerrillas, razed villages, civilian massacres. Army hasn't much time for that now. Irony: Bengalis probably safer now that general war is on.

Back at the Intercontinental tonight. Evening talk at the hotel is of UN plane turning back 10 minutes out of Dacca because of Indian air strike at airport just before a temporary cease-fire scheduled to go into effect. And Gen. Rao Farman Ali Khan gave an afternoon press conference in which he said Pak forces, facing some supply problems, are cut off from West Pakistan for the time being, and on the defensive for the time being. He said the best Pak defense is to gradually cede some territory to the advancing Indians. Last week his boss, Gen. Niazi, had said the best defense is an offensive. But times change.

TUESDAY, DEC. 1: Dacca seems to be learning to live with war—or, rather, threat of war, because Indians so far bombing only few military targets on city outskirts. But people do keep glancing nervously at sky. UN tried again for mercy flight, but tie plane was hit by naval gunfire, presumably Indian, off East Pakistani coast. India not winning very many friends among stranded Westerners here. Some Americans in hotel lobby demanding to lmow why the Marines don't come in and evacuate them. "We did it in the Congo," one says. "Yeah, but this ain't the Congo," another says. "It will be soon," the first says.

I am out near the airport when an air-raid siren goes off. Run across field and spot a fox-hole. Eia do four Bengali rickshaw peddlers. So we all squat politely around the rim of the fox-hole—no one wanting to be the first to hop in. It wouldn't hold more than three. But the planes pass over, and we share a cigarette.

The-military situation remains, in the words of a Pak communique, “unclear.” An American diplomat says Pakistan is "between a rock and a hard place." Have lunch with a West Pakistani pilot for Pakistan International Airlines who is stranded: "What do you plan to do?" he is asked. "Die here," he says. Almost everyone thinks there will be another bloodbath soon, with Bengalis taking their revenge on non-Bengali minority (Biharis) and other army collaborators. If it's an eye for an eye, there will have to be a lot of Bihari eyes lost.

Rumor that food supply at the hotel is running short. Menu is dwindling a bit, but food is still remarkably good and always lots of butter available. The hotel bought out the stock of a Danish dairy project that folded just before the war. "But can man live by butter alone?" one foreigner asks.

More Indian air strikes in the afternoon. High-altitude bombing. Now the hotel roof is full of journalists and photographers. One cameraman just up from the swimming pool is still in his bathing suit. Another reporter brings a chair. A diplomat on the roof says Biharis are looting evacuated homes. "Well," he adds, "they can't take it with them where they're going." General feeling seems to be that Biharis had fun while it lasted. One talks of mass killing quite calmly here. A half-million Bengalis massacred by the army in the last nine months and so on. East Pakistan is like a sponge that soaks up suffering. "You could drop Biafra into East Pakistan and never find it again," the diplomat says.

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 8: The breakfast rumor is that Gen. Niazi bugged out last night on a small plane to Burma. Last week he said, "The more Indians who come, the more Indians to kill, the more I am happy." Tend to doubt the bugout report, but he may later wish he had.

Military situation still very vague, but reports have Indian advance units about 35 miles southeast of Dacca. "The military situation is deteriorating faster than we anticipated," an embassy source says. The Bengalis one encounters seem delighted by way it's going. Independent nation of Bangla Desh probably no more than a week away.

UN mercy-flight plans seem to be in limbo. The UN people are always in conference. Curious how much attention we all pay to the plight of several hundred foreign nationals stranded at International. A half-million or so Bengalis probably died in last nine months; another 10 million or more trapped in misery, of border camps. What makes a few hundred Western lives so valuable?

Rooftop air-strike-watcher crowd thinning a bit. Rumor has it one cameraman was nicked in backside by piece of ack-ack shrapnel. Intercontinental filling up with armed West Pakistani civilians, which makes other guests uneasy. Radio news says President Nixon says war broke off sensitive negotiations that could have led to "virtual autonomy" for East Pakistan. Last March the Bengalis were demanding "virtual autonomy." Bit late for virtuals. Tele-vision correspondents have secret information that small Pak plane planning make secret night flight to secret Burma airstrip and pilot willing to take some film and newspaper copy. Film packed in a suttee ae and ready to go.

One of week's unlikelier eventualities: In evening we roast marshmallows over a candle on a poker table.

THURSDAY, DEC. 9: "Only 10 shopping days till Christmas," says an American businessman at breakfast. Kind of crisis conviviality continues. Another American goes off to consulate to pick up his income-tax forms. "I may be an optimist," he says, "but it's some-thing to do." But there are a few frayed nerves. A gray toy poodle named Baby, stranded in hotel along with "parents," has been under tranquilizers since war began.

Definite sense that Pak army crumbling. Gen. Niazi rumor still being circulated. Reports have Indian units 20 miles from Dacca. Indian radio says all major East Pakistani towns except Dacca and port of Chittagong have fallen. Pakistan radio denies it. Pak army elements said to be leaving their cantonment and dispersing to scattered positions around the city. They evidently took over a tuberculosis hospital, evicting patients onto street. We drive around the city and see few soldiers, but we see a West Pakistani policeman beating a Bengali with a stick. Consistent to the end.

Everyone wonders whether Pak army will try to make last-ditch stand in Dacca. Some UN people talking of plan for conditional surrender of Pakistani troops in East Pakistan. Condition would be safe return to West Pakistan. But who could guarantee that?

Visited residential area where three bombs fell last night. Used to be an orphanage here, but now it's just three big craters surrounded by mountains of mud and debris. Watch several small bodies being dug out of the mud. Orphan "body count" later said to total over 200.

International Red Cross (Geneva) succeeded in having Intercontinental and one hospital designated "neutral zones." This evening group of Red Cross officials and journalists moved from room to room confiscating weapons, mainly from West Pakistani guests. Several packets of explosives found in women's lavatory. They are moved out to hotel lawn and surrounded by sandbags. Swimming pool consequently closed.

FRIDAY, DEC. 10: The talk at breakfast is about the 3 a.m. air raid during which several bombs landed close to hotel. I slept through it. More Bengalis seem to be leaving the city today for relative safety of villages. Bengali friend, in tears, tells me about continuing army massacres of Bengalis in several suburbs. "So many children," he says and begins to sob. Non-Bengali minority (Biharis) fleeing villages for relative safety of Dacca.

Bengalis in Dacca all seem convinced that the bombs that landed on civilian areas the past two nights, including the one that hit the orphanage; were dropped by Pakistani planes so civilian casualties could be blamed on India. Reliable foreign sources note that the bombs were dropped by propeller planes, not Una, and that makeshift bomb rack fell from plane along with bombs. Evidence still circumstantial. All seems incredibly cold-blooded. But one diplomat says "Anyone who has been here since March wouldn't blink an eye at the Palm doing something like that."

One rumor is squelched. Gen. Niazi shows up at hotel gate and is very definitely not in Burma. Under new Red Cross rules he is told he cannot enter the hotel with his weapon.

UN still negotiating with Paks and Indians to bring in evacuation planes. Apparent success. Twenty-four-hour cease-fire in air activity in Calcutta-to-Dacca corridor goes into effect 6 p.m. Evacuation planes, at least for women and children, scheduled to fly into Dacca tomorrow morning. But then they've been scheduled before.

It's how exactly one week since general war began.

SATURDAY, DEC. 11: Midmorning blast at United States Information Service library. Debris scattered 1010 yards around. Books lying all over the road, including "The Nuclear Years" and "The Role of Popular Participation in Development." This island of popular participation in destruction. Did the Mukti Bahini do it? Librarian says man who blasted it spoke Urdu, language of West Pakistan. Who knows? Within minutes books being looted from rubble. Old man goes by with tome called "Religion and Ethics" under his arm.

Big rumor of the day is that Gen. Rao Farman Ali Khan, deputy martial-law administrator and the "gentleman general" of Pak forces here, was involved in secret negotiations, apparently with UN, to make conditional surrender of Pak forces in East Pakistan. But—the rumor goes—the commander here, Gen. Niazi, and President Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan in Islamabad found out. All this said to have affected evacuation planes, which don't come in again today. Part of problem with planes is that India, for political reasons, insists they fly to Dacca from Calcutta. Pakistan, for political reasons, won't accept that.

Stranded foreigners sense they have become political pawns. Looks more and more likely that Pak army will make a last-ditch stand in Dacca. Diplomatic sources say more troops being brught into city—or simply falling back here on their own. Gen. Niazi reported to have told a journalist at the airport: "You will be here to see me die."

Mood at American consulate very low. Realization America backed losing side and will suffer diplomatic and perhaps other consequences from it. "The U.S. mucked up this situation perfectly," a Western diplomat says. This afternoon a curfew is clamped on the city. The streets are deserted. One estimate is that fewer than half the city's 1.3 million people are still here.

Red Cross calls meeting at hotel. Meeting is presided over by retired British colonel, now Red Cross official. Very David Niven. Tells hotel residents to disregard the "quite extraordinary rumors floating around" but adds that hotel guests on higher floors might want to move down a "wee bit." Says hotel security man, Mr. Beg, did "jolly good job" of defusing those bombs in the toilet and says that they have since been buried in a slit trench so the pool is open again. Applause. But cautions that quite a bit of shrapnel from ack-ack guns has been pulled from swimming pool. Dive at your own risk.

Journalists try telephoning various towns around East Pakistan to see whether Pakistani or Indian army answers the call. Most phone lines are down, but we get through to lamina, town in southwest that supposedly fell to Indian army days ago. Some sergeant answers phone. "Where are the Indians?" we ask. Good cowboy-movie line. "Not here," he says.

SUNDAY, DEC. 12: A fulI-day curfew is in effect. City completely still as if some epidemic had suddenly wiped out all living things except the black crows hovering everywhere. Of course, the only epidemic in the city now is fear. We awoke to the noise of C130 transports circling overhead. Looks as if evacuation flights for women and kids really are coming in. If the planes are leaving, this diary may leave with them.

By Peter R. Kann

MUNSHIGANJ SUBDIVISION, East Pakistan—As Indian forces intensify their pressure against East Pakistan, it appears certain that an independent Bengal Nation will emerge. Yesterday the battle for Dacca began, and some top civilian officials of the East Pakistani government resigned.

What would Bangla Desh, as the Bengalie call it, be like? It's impossible to tell for sure. But the Mukti Bahini, or liberation fighters, have taken control of much of rural East Pakistan as well as a lengthening list of larger towns. Thus, a recounting of a trip to one of these areas taken just before the general Indian-Pakistani war broke out may offer some-thing of a microcosmic view of a future Bangla Desh, its army, its administrators and its people.

The area chosen was Munshiganj Subdivision, a village 22 miles south of Dacca. The trip was taken in what is called a "country boat" —a 60-foot rivercraft of advanced age that chugs down one of the many broad and meandering branches of the Ganges. The boat trip takes about eight hours, for rivers don't flow 22 miles as the crow flies.

Such a visit tends to try one's tolerance for inflated rhetoric and exaggerated claims as well as for the lukewarm tea that is hospitably (but constantly and insistently) served to foreigners by every Bengali within walking distance of a tea leaf. There are large quantities of both naivete and overconfidence to be found among the Muktis. And much of what one sees and hears appears to be a false front: Bangla Desh flags hoisted for visitors and later tucked away, the orchestrated cheers and rehearsed military exercises. There are also signs of lack of forceful leadership as well as some indications of indiscipline.

Tea & Rhetoric

Whatever their weaknesses, however, the Muktis were in control of Munshiganj Subdivision. A Bangla Desh civil administration was functioning, probably as efficiently as any other administration ever functioned here. Its local courts could be seen dealing with local land disputes, squabbles over trees and fish-ponds, and marital problems. Bangla Desh administrators were collecting revenue. The Muktis were armed and some of them trained. And there was no doubting the massive popular support they had from the local people.

Within minutes after arrival, our small party is having tea in a Bengali house, surrounded by generally friendly and uniformly vocal Bangla Desh partisans. The rhetoric is dramatic; Bengalis are born orators. Speaking of the Punjabis, West Pakistan's dominant ethnic group, a 60-year-old member of the local Bangla Desh civil administration says: "The Punjabi brutes have tortured our people as no other people have been tortured. A burning fire is in our hearts. How can we tolerate the brutes? All ways are now closed to them."

A young Mukti says, "Last week we operated on (killed) 36 Punjabis." How many prisoners did the Muktis take? he is asked. "None," he replies. "That's remarkable," a visitor says. "Remarkable and gallant," the old man interjects. He pulls up his shirt to dis-play a black band tucked in the waist of his sarong. "When I find a Punjabi, I put my black band over his eyes, and then I stab him."

Explains a young man with a Sten gun: "Before, we were soft-minded, but now we are cruel. We are making Bangla Desh a free nation on the map and Inshallah (God willing) we are succeeding." Another local leader explains that after the Pakistani army is defeated, it will be only a matter of time before Indian West Bengal is incorporated into a "Greater Bangla Desh." The Indian state of Assam will have to be added also, he says. What about Tripuray, another Indian state bordering on East Pakistan? "Yes, that too."

Trouble With the Scenario

It is a scenario that isn't completely improbable for the more distant future—and some of the Muktis' Indian sponsors privately worry about the loss of several Indian states to the new nation.

Piecing together an accurate history of events in this area isn't easy. But it appears that as in most parts of East Pakistan, the Bangla Desh flag was hoisted here briefly last March. In April and May the Pakistani army swept through this area but less devastatingly than in many other places. Most of the local Hindus, special targets of the Pakistani army, fled to India.

Some nearby villages apparently were razed, but we see none of these on this trip. As the Pakistani army moved through the area, the villagers fled deeper and deeper into the countryside. When the army left, the villagers returned. There followed some months of a military and political vacuum. The presence of the West Pakistani government barely reached these villages in any form, but the Muktis themselves were a weak and largely covert presence. Within the past month, however, the Muktis filled the vacuum. This coincided with Indian pressure along the borders and also apparently with the return of better-armed and better-trained Muktis from Indian border train-ing camps. Gradually a ring of Mukti-controlled countryside has been closing in around Dacca. Munshiganj Subdivision is part of that ring.

On the second day of our trip, we get a better look at the Muktis. We are guided several miles downriver to another village and welcomed ashore with the fanfare of flags, cheers and even a Bangla Desh photographer in a natty woolen suit who stands on the riverbank to snap our pictures as we step ashore. A crowd of perhaps 600 villagers was assembled on two hours' notice, an official explains. "With two days' notice," he adds, '"we could have gotten two million."

As a green, red and yellow Bangla Desh flag flutters from the tallest one-story building, the 500 "citizens of Bangla Desh" respond in well-cadenced chorus to a cheerleader's calls.

"Free our leader, Sheikh Mujib (who is imprisoned)," the cheerleader yells.

"Sheikh Mujib, Sheikh Mujib!" the crowd responds.

"My country, your country!" the leader screams.

Then, like 500 Ed McMahorts introducing Johnny Carson comes the crowd response: "Joi Bangla (Victory to Bengal)!"

Lined up nearby are 60 or so Mukti Bahini. They are dressed in sarongs or loincloths and armed with a smorgasbord of weaponry: old Lee-Enfield .303 rifles, snub-barreled Sten guns, AK47 automatics, shotguns and grenades.

The guests are treated to a display of ambush tactics by the Muktis. The men crawl through some low underbrush, gripping their weapons, one man with a grenade between his teeth, while an officer with a brass whistle whistles directions. The Bangla Desh photographer photographs an ABC camera crew photographing the ambush display.

The Muktis here seem to run the gamut from very professional to totally amateur. The professionals include a few former members of the regular Pakistani army and some veterans of paramilitary and police forces. The local unit commander was a sergeant in the regular army and tells his bitter story: "In March the bastard Punjabi sepoys (soldiers) stopped saluting me. . . . Later, one of the bastard sepoys blowed me on the face with a gun.. . . The bastard sepoys struck my wife. . . . Later, I saw the bastard Punjabis forcibly rape young Bengali girls in the open field. . . . I escaped and determined to take my revenge at all costs and all circumstances. . . Inshallah I have so far killed 40 Punjabi soldiers. . .. I take my revenge."

"Freedom Fighters"

Most of the Muktis in the area seem to be students, and many appear to have made the trek to training camps just over the border in India and then to have infiltrated back here. The Bangla Desh officials don't admit that this is so; indeed, they deny any links with India. But several young Muktis proudly begin to relate their experiences in India before being hushed up by more politically attuned colleagues. And some of the Muktis carry Indian-made arms.

Many Muktis throughout East Pakistan probably aren't entirely pleased that the full-scale war between India and Pakistan is on. Presumably they would have won their independence with limited Indian help. But now, if Bangla Desh is created, it may appear all too much an Indian-produced product.

While some of the Muktis in this village seem to have been well-trained at various camps, others probably have received no training at all. But every young man here calls himself a "freedom fighter." And most claim to have personally killed at least one Punjabi squad.

"We are all ahaeed," one youth says. "That means men who die for the sake of their country," a buddy explains. "He killed more than 10 Punjabis," they say, pointing to a third youth. I scribble the number "10" in my note-book. "No, more than 10," says the first youth, genuinely offended. Weapons are handled almost reverently by the Muktis. "This is my very life and good friend," says a pudgy young soldier in dark glasses, caressing his vintage Lee-Enfield rifle.

In another village a court is in session. Ten mostly elderly members of a local Bangla Desh council sit behind a low wooden table and busy themselves scribbling notes on the cases they are hearing. This day the cases involve (1) a dispute over a 30-square-yard plot of land, (2) a marital squabble, (3) a quarrel between two fishermen over rights to a pond, (4) a creditor's demand for payment of a $5 debt and (5) a dispute between two neighbors over who has the right to chop down a tree.

No cases are decided, and all are recessed for further hearings. But the court proceedings appear genuine and in their modest way impressive. These are the kinds of day-to-day issues that concern Bengali, or any other Asian, villagers, and Bangla Desh is dealing with them.

"Voluntary Contributions"

The council also handles revenue collection, encouraging "voluntary contributions" from the public for support of the war. The members of the council are a solidly bourgeois lot (two schoolteachers, two businessmen, a doctor and two "cultivators" among them)—the normal sort of respected elders of any small Asian community.

The council members say they were "elected" by local people, but it appears they were appointed by higher Bangla Desh echelons with the apparent approval of the local populace. In principle, at least, the local Muk-tis are under command of civil administrators. In practice, however, it seems that the Muktis report and respond to their own military chain of command.

In any case, both the Muktis and the administrators have regular contact with higher headquarters and thus with national Bangla Desh headquarters, still located in Indian West Bengal. An indication of the effectiveness of the lines of communication is that by the third day of our visit here, Bangla Desh radio, from its transmitters in India, was announcing our presence by name.

In this area, there doesn't appear to be any Communist influence among the Muktis. In certain other areas, that isn't the case. Reports from reliable sources in the remoter southern sectors of East Pakistan say large areas already are under control of "Nazalite" Maoist guerrilla groups, some of them in temporary alliance with the-Bangla Desh cause while others are at war with both the Pakistani and Bangla Desh forces.

But the non-Communist Bangla Desh elements certainly outnumber the Communist ones. And in Sheikh Mujib, now a prisoner in West Pakistan, the "bourgeois" Bangla Desh have the sole Bengali national hero.

There are some exasperating, if not particularly significant, experiences with the Munshiganj Muktis. Although welcomed as "honored guests" by the local liberation forces, our group, sleeping on our boat, is subjected to constant liberation raids on our food supplies by conspicuously armed young Muktis. It is a small thing in a land where one can legitimately ask why foreigners should eat better than the natives.

But foreigners certainly don't sleep better. Besides the food raids, there are post-midnight visits by Muktis who poke their heads through the boat's cabin windows and ask the snoring foreigners, "Are you asleep?"

By Peter R. Kann

DACCA—Throughout the short and bloody war here, it was all but impossible to get news out of the country. Thus, I began keeping a diary when war broke out Dec. 3. It is not meant to be a history of the war—if only be-cause from here one could see only a very small slice of the conflict that engulfed the subcontinent.

The first part of this diary appeared in The Wail Street Journal of Dec. 14. The concluding part follows. As I mentioned in the first report, some of my notes are editorial and even somewhat personal, for which I can only offer the excuse that facts were scarce during the war and the situation encouraged reflection.

SUNDAY, DEC. 12: Father Timm of Holy Cross College arrives at the Intercontinental Hotel to say mass about 9:15, but word has just arrived that evacuation flights are on the way. Foreigners are rushing to get to airport. "Now I know what it feels like to be a bride left standing at the altar," the father says. Ride out to airport with elderly American couple booked on evac flight. Man is wearing aluminum hard hat, lady is clutching cage with two squawking myna birds. "I had to leave my dog," she says. "It was terrible."

At airport British diplomats and other volunteers out sweeping runway with tree branches to try to clear away shrapnel. British Royal Air Force C130s make several passes; finally one risks landing on badly damaged runway. Safe landing amid great clouds of orange dust. Cheers and applause from evacuees. Propellers turning as evacuees run to planes and board. All quite orderly. Women and children on first plane and so on.

Indonesian embassy people try to get massive suitcases on board. "Ten kilos only" is the command. Amazing how attached people get to belongings; even-last passengers for last plane trying to tote valises down runway when extra 30 seconds could mean missing plane. Some tears and frayed nerves.

Scenes like Pakistani army major approaching American official to ask if his wife could please be evacuated. Answer is no, and the Pakistani says thank you and turns away. Soviet consul general is in good spirits. "I am happy my fair lady is aboard the plane," he says.

Paks maintain symbolic presence at airport with immigration officer standing amid shattered glass and other rubble of terminal building to stamp passports of evacuees. But it's basically a British show. "Now I know why you guys won the Battle of Britain," German television correspondent tells a British colleague. Four C130s finally get off, in the four-hour airlift, taking almost all the foreigners who want to go.

Hotel strangely quiet now that evac flights gone. Remaining Westerners, mostly journalists, spend afternoon by swimming pool in pickup games of water polo and soccer and tossing dirt clots at the omnipresent crows. Games break off every hour on the hour for BBC radio news. Indians moving closer to Dacca, crossing rivers, supposedly dropping parachute units. But Dacca under curfew and no one going out to find the war. Someone at poolside reading book, Six Days in June: Israel's Fight for Survival. Pak army has so far survived 10 days, but betting here is that it won't last two weeks. Pak army still razing neighborhoods in city outskirts, and fires can be seen burning from hotel.

MONDAY, DEC. 13: A morning paper an-nounces with bold headline, "Enemy Advance Halted," but longest article in paper is "Specter of Famine Haunts Upper Volta." From breakfast room, one can watch hotel employe pulling bits of ack-ack shrapnel out of swimming pool with a magnet tied to the end of a rope.

Drive to city center during six-hour period when curfew lifted. Much of Bengali population has deserted city, but many Biharis (non-Bengali minority) visible on streets and, of course; the rickshaw peddlers. I see fewer Pakistani flags flying today. "Every sewing machine in Dacca is busy working on Bangla Desh flags," diplomat says.

Gen. A. A. K. Niazi, commander of Pakistani forces in the East, shows up across street from the hotel and gives curbside interview. How is the battle going? "As I planned it." Will you defend the city? "To the last." But doesn't that mean Dacca may be destroyed? "These are the prices of freedom." What about a ceasefire or surrender? "The army will die. There is no question of surrender. There will be no one left to be repatriated." Wonder if his troops share the sentiments.

Small crowd of perhaps 25 Biharis standing around Gen. Niazi chanting, "Pakistan, Zindabad, Pakistan, Zindabad," meaning, "Long life, Pakistan." Several are weeping. Several others jumping up and down screaming madly. Rickshaw passes, and Bihari passenger does wild war dance on the seat as Bengali driver pedals on with head bowed. Biharis going out in kind of final frenzy of the damned.

The press corps, under direction of handful of Red Cross people, now has taken over most of the responsibility for security at the hotel, which has been declared a neutral zone. So there's an early-afternoon security search of all rooms in an effort to confiscate any remaining guns and to try to ascertain how many people are holed up in hotel and who they are. Four more guns found on West Pakistani civilians, some of whom are living six to a room. In the evening, residents meet in a room that used to feature Australian strippers in better days. Rather solemn talk about first aid and fire-fighting equipment, security guard duty, slit trenches.

TUESDAY, DEC. 14: By early afternoon it appears the battle of Dacca is about to begin. Indian MIGs rocket "Government House"—governor's office—in central city. Two reporters return from several-hour drive southeast of city. They report Indian troops seven miles from city and advancing with only one river to cross. Considerable fighting. Indian planes drop leaflets on city calling for all military and paramilitary forces to surrender to nearest Indian unit with guarantee of protection for lives and property.

Red Cross official says food situation in Dacca has become desperate. All foodstuffs in short supply, many shops closed, curfew prevents people reaching open shops, and prices now so high that poor cannot afford to buy remaining food anyway.

Local paper announces that "due to emergency situation and difficulties of communication, it has been decided to suspend the Get-a-Word Competition in East Pakistan until further notice. The inconvenience caused to the competitors is due to reasons beyond the con-trol of the management and is regretted." Its midafternoon and there's more bombing close to city.

News of the resignation of A. M. Malik, governor of East Pakistan, and rest of the civilian government. One UN official who was in the governor's office about 1 p.m. says Malik wrote out the resignation longhand between the first and second Indian air strikes on Government House. Then Malik washed his feet, knelt and prayed. During brief interlude between the strikes, Gen. Rao Farman Ali Khan, deputy martial-law administrator here, ran down hall past UN man and said: "Why are the Indians doing this to us?" UN man tells a reporter: "As we were under direct air attack at the lime, I didn't go into political explanations." Paks really seem to think it's somehow unfair, unsporting for India to be winning the war.

Later, a Pakistani colonel arrives at hotel gate and is asked how the military situation is going. "Plenty fine," he says. Will army surrender? "Of course not." Will you keep fighting? "Of course." Very polite, very soft-spoken.

I spend two hours on door duty searching luggage of arriving ministers of civilian government who are seeking refuge here. Strange role for a reporter, but all rules are fluid here. Some of ministers wait as if in trance as bags are combed. Others try to joke. One says: "Ashes to ashes and dust to dust; if the Indians don't get you, the Muktis must." But he can't manage a smile at his own joke.

Several photographers return from site of afternoon air strikes. Say rockets hit civilian neighborhood, killing at least dozen Bengali civilians. At the site there were two young members of the Mukti Bahini, or East Pakistani guerrillas. "Why did they (Indian planes) do it?" says one of the shaken Muktis. ''We are their friends."

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 15: Indian air strike during breakfast. Dining room empties in about 10 seconds. Whole roomful of half-eaten instant scrambled eggs.

The chairman of the Dacca Peace Committee, a key collaborator with the West Pakistanis, arrives at hotel gate and is turned away. He argues for a while, finally walks off as if in a trance, like a man walking to his death.

Gen. Farman arrives about 9 a.m. Will the Pakistani army surrender? "Why should we surrender? The question of surrender does not arise." Farman is riding around in a Mercedes camouflaged with mud, two general stars on its license plate. No armed escort.

A few minutes after 10, a British journalist runs by, yelling that Farman is coming to hotel to surrender within the hour. Great excitement. TV types pleading with one another to get organized, form a line. "For once,". they say, "let's not have to photograph each other."

Farman enters gate on schedule but turns corner and gives TV cameras nothing but long shots. Rumor is that President Yahya gave approval to surrender plan last night, but Gen. Niazi may be balking.

Pak army doctor, a colonel, arrives at hotel. Sad conversation. "What is honor?" he says. "How much sacrifice must be made for honor's sake? In the old days we fought duels for our honor. Now a million men must die to satisfy honor." He says Pak army has taken terrible casualties.

Gen. Farman leaves the hotel. Many surrender rumors still floating. Too many.

Lee Lescaze of Washington Post and I now doing four-hour guard duty at gate. Lee stops a mongoose trying to scurry under the gate into neutral zone. We suggest mongoose get Iranian passport. 

Evening radio news says dollar being devalued. Seems like pretty distant crisis from here. Japanese consul general remarks that Pak army must surrender "like Japan at the end of World War II."

Staggering rush of events these past days. Like watching a pro football team play its whole season in one week.

THURSDAY, DEC. 16: At 10:10 a.m. a hotel official walks up: "It's definite, it's definite. It's surrender." Five minutes later, UN aides in the hotel make it official: "The ultimatum to surrender has been accepted."

Several reporters hitch a ride out to Pakistani army cantonment to try to see Gen. Farman. No luck but quite a spectacle at cantonment gate. Soldiers now pouring into cantonment in every sort of vehicle—buses, trucks, cars, even rickshaw. Rolling by is a microbus with these words stenciled on back: "Live and let live." West Pak and Bihari civilians also trying to enter cantonment. Most of them seem to have deserted all personal belongings except transistor radios.

Pay visit to Paul Marc Henri, UN chief here, who is operating out of another neutral zone at Notre Dame College. Henri in ebullient mood over surrender but stresses his role only as channel of communications. He's walking around college campus with big, black Labrador on a chain. Labrador keeps getting into fights with another dog, interrupting Henri's monologue. Henri still concerned over possible massacres of minorities. One of his assistants puts it plainly: "Tonight will be the night of the long knives."

Rush out to airport with other reporters. At 12:46 a Pak army staff car with two stars on plate rolls up. Figure it's Pak general coming to meet Indian helicopter. But a general in purple turban and another in cavalry hat get out; that isn't Pak military headgear. "Hello, I am Gen. Nagra, Indian army," cavalry hat says, "and this is Brigadier Kler," he adds, introducing turban. They had lead Indian column that pushed into Dacca suburbs from north early this morning.

We hear of mob trouble at Intercontinental and return to the hotel. A hysterical Mukti is carried through hotel gate with a light leg wound. Mukti finally is laid out on three hotel chairs. Hotel official arrives, dapper as ever in glen plaid suit. "He's bleeding all over my damned best chairs, and all the bastard did was stub his damned toe," hotel man says.

This city is full of panicky men with guns: excited young Muktis, confused Indians and frightened Pak troops who are trying to surrender but who don't know how or where to do so.

This afternoon Gen. Nagra and Pak Gen. Farman come to hotel gate in jeep. Mob begins shouting at Farman : "Butcher, killer, bastard." Farman walks toward mob and says, soft-spoken, "But don't you know what I did for you?" He means the surrender, which saved lives. Maybe the mob knows, but it doesn't care.

It's 5 p.m., and reporters rush to golf course for formal surrender ceremony. Surrender papers are signed in quadruplicate. Takes a while because Gen. Niazi reads the documents as if for the first time. Scene after signing is com-plete chaos. Mob trying to carry Indian generals on shoulders, Pak generals being jostled by crowds. Gen. Farman is wandering alone, dazed, through milling mob. "You see, we are beaten everywhere," he mumbles as two run-ning Bengalis bump into him. Farman continues walking slowly, one hand in sweater pocket. "How do I get out of this place?" he asks no one in particular before I lose him in the crowd.

FRIDAY, DEC. 17: Chat with the hotel laundry bookkeeper who has emerged as a Mukti police inspector. Turns out he had been Mukti cell leader for Intercontinental Hotel staff during past nine months. He had devised an underclothing code. If an agent handed him one undershirt, it meant four terrorist acts had been successfully completed. Two undershirts meant three successes, three undershirts meant two successes and four undershirts meant only one terrorist success. Nothing seems incredible here any more.

At 5:55 p.m. two Soviet correspondents arrive. "We are Tass and Pravda. We have just arrived. What is the news?" they say.

Two hours later, sipping scotch in a hotel room, a reporter says, "Hey, the lights are on." And so they are. It’s the first night in nearly two weeks that's not spent by candlelight.

Later, three Indians arrive to report that "the city is all quiet now, a curfew has been imposed, we have stopped all this bloody shoot-ing business and. . . ." The rest is drowned out by automatic-weapons fire.

But today was quieter than yesterday.

SATURDAY, DEC. 18: Considerable shooting and some killings, especially of Biharis, still continuing. A Bangla Desh victory celebration turns into a bloody spectacle; four West Pakistani sympathizers are tortured and killed. Earlier today Muktis uncovered mass graves of prominent Bengali intellectuals who had been taken hostage by local militiamen and butchered night before last. This is a tradi-tionally bloody society that has just gone through a nine-month bloodbath. Why should the bloodletting suddenly stop?

At the airport, an Indian brigadier wanders around the terminal area trying to organize re-pair of the runway, which is full of holes. He wants Bengalis, not Indian troops, to make the repairs, which are, of course, vital for any relief effort. "But the Bengali chaps are just milling around and celebrating all day," he says with exasperation. For now shouting ''Joi Bangla" (Victory to Bengal) is more important to the Bengalis than food.

Dacca appears to be calming down gradually. Some men are taking their wives and children for their first stroll in Bangla Desh. One Bengali says his three-year-old son, Aupoo, hasn't been taken out in public for months. The reason is that last March, during the brief period before the Pakistani army cracked down and imposed a reign of terror on the East, the child learned to shout "Joi Bangla." But for the past nine months the parents feared that the child might shout "Joi Bangla" in public and thus get the family killed. Today both father and son are on the streets, yelling, "Joi Bangla!"

By Peter R. Kann

DACCA—In the poorer societies of Asia, childbirth all too often ends in infant mortality.

And so it may be with the birth of a nation—Bangla Desh. Its odds of survival, or at least of developing into a stable and viable country, may well be even worse than the odds its infants face.

Then, too, an Asian infant's survival isn't an unmixed blessing, for it means another mouth to feed. Similarly, if Bangla Desh survives to become an "emerging nation," it will almost surely have to be on a diet of someone else's bread, just as it was delivered by someone else's guns. That someone else—recent midwife and future wet nurse—is India, of course.

Few who have followed the bloody nine-month gestation of Bangla Desh can fail to sympathize with the Bengali people and to wish their nation well. But it is far easier to be sympathetic than to be optimistic about the future of this land. Bangla Desh faces enormous economic, social and political problems—all compounded by the chaos of its nine-month civil war and by the great and naive expectations of a newly politicized society.

An Arkansas-Sized Mud Flat

East Bengal has always been one of the world's poorest and most overpopulated lands—an Arkansas-sized mud flat with 75 million people, short of land, devoid of minerals, lacking industry, dependent on foreign food supplies for its bare subsistence. Its people, traditionally dominated—and exploited—by outsiders, may lack the experience, if not the ability, to rule themselves. If people can be said to have national characters, then the Bengalis may generously be defined as excitable, undisciplined and impractical At their best they are poets and dreamers; but rarely are they mak-ers and doers. In the past, Bengalis have been able to blame their misfortunes on outsiders, but with the birth of Bangla Desh this can no longer be the case.

The Pakistani army, of course, made Bangla Desh's prospects dimmer by systematically slaughtering the leadership of this society: politicians, professional men, teachers, students and others. Only a few days before Bangla Desh was, born, the Pakistanis butchered several hundred prominent Dacca intellectuals and dumped their bodies in mass graves. And that was only the most recent of many, many such massacres.

But the Bengalis too can be violent people, and the very violence of their society is cause for some pessimism about their future. This isn't reported in shock over the recent, highly publicized torture slaying—by boot and bayonet—of four Pakistani army collaborators at a Bangla Desh victory celebration. The scale of Pakistani army atrocities over the past nine months made some degree of Bengali retribu-tion inevitable, and the surprising thing has been that the Bengalis haven't (or haven't yet) indulged in mass slayings of the million or so members of Bangla Desh's non-Bengali minority, the Biharis. Perhaps the Bengalis are still too busy yelling, "Joi Bangla" (Victory to Bengal), and the big bloodbath is yet to come. But so far, at least around Dacca, Bengali retribution has been rather random and statistically unspectacular.

Violence and Respectability

The issue isn't this particular round of violence, but the continuum of violence—not violence in the sense of battle but violence as a disease, endemic, like ringworm or dysentery. The orgy of killing these past nine months has been only partly political in cause. Beneath the surface of a "liberation war," of Mukti Bahini "freedom fighter" vs. Pakistani army "oppressor," common men have been murdering each other out of ethnic prejudice and religious passion, to settle village land disputes and family squabbles, for reasons of personal power and profit. Violence had always been normal; the civil war only made it more respectable.

One effect of the civil war has been to spread guns around this land in abundance, and it could try any government's capabilities to disarm men who, for the first time in their lives, have found happiness with a warm sten gun. (The Indian army has been trying in recent days, at least in Dacca, to disarm some of the celebrating young Muktis, but with only limited success.)

One of the less heralded openings for violence will soon come now that some 10 million or so refugees have begun heading back home from Indian border camps. Part of their property was grabbed by Biharis, who will have little choice but to return it. But no land lies vacant for long here; many refugees will also return to find fellow Bengalis camped on their plots, and one can envision many such disputed claims being settled with guns.

Needed: Law and Order

What Bangla Desh needs, of course, is a government that can provide at least a modicum of leadership, law and order. For a week after liberation, Bangla Desh was a nation without a government. The acting president, prime minister and other cabinet members finally returned to Dacca- last Thursday. But the maximum leader, Bangabandhu (Great Friend of Bengal), Banglar Nayan Mani (Eyes of the Bengali People)—that is, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman—is under house arrest in West Pakistan.

The return to Bangla Desh of Sheikh Mujib, as he is called, is one way—perhaps the only way—to keep the country from sinking deeper into chaos, some analysts believe. As a captive in the prison of the oppressor—he was transferred last week from prison to house arrest in West Pakistan—Sheikh Mujib became both hero and martyr to his people. Indeed, he attained a degree of deification that few other leaders anywhere else in the world have been accorded by their people.

Yet Westerners who know Sheikh Mujib tend to be far from mesmerised and generally view him as a man of limited abilities. One diplomat recalls a scene in March of last year, just before the civil war began in Pakistan, when a half-dozen students went to the home of Sheikh Mujib and demanded that he haul down his Pakistani flag. The leader tried to resist the demands of this handful of young followers—and then caved in and complied. The diplomat's conclusion: "He isn't a great man but a man who has had greatness thrust upon him."

Sheikh Mujib's return could be of great short-term benefit—by calming down his countrymen, preventing open squabbling among lesser leaders, calling for continuing national sacrifice and maybe even setting the nation on an initially constructive course. But many analysts doubt that even Sheikh Mujib's presence in Bangla Desh could prevent chaos for very long.

Whatever his failings may be, Sheikh Mujib certainly offers more hope for his people than the current Bangla Desh officials. The Bangla Desh government, which sat out the war in Calcutta, India, comprises a lackluster lot of officials, none of whom seems to be a strong leader or to have much mass following. The officials already appear to be somewhat divided—by policies and personal ambitions—and their differences may well grow sharper now that they have returned to Dacca and must make decisions and build a national administration.

This "legitimate" Bangla Desh government —basically leaders of Sheikh Mujib's Awami League—will also face challenges from various Mukti Bahini military men and other guerrilla warlords. These are men who have guns behind them and who can well ask why the inheritors of the revolutionary war should be men who drank tea in Calcutta while others were hiding and fighting in the paddies of Bangla Desh.

Internal Divisions Everywhere

The Muktis themselves are far from united. They range from regular units, at least initially loyal to the Bangla Desh government, down through a variety of warlords and gunslingers, to some tough and disciplined Maoist-motivated Naxalite guerrillas. The Naxalites, who are strongest in the poorest southern areas of Bangla Desh, were fighting before the civil war began and have since thrived on nine months of general chaos. Some made temporary deals with the Mukti Bahini, and others fought against both the Muktis and the army—as well as among themselves, for they too are internally divided.

Many of the Naxalites can be expected to continue fighting—against bourgeois Bengali rule. Some observers thus see the Bengali revolution following a kind of classic revolutionary pattern from moderatism to extremism. One need only look at the mass misery of this land to grant the Maoists at least a reasonable chance of eventual success. "All the regular Muktis want to do is walk into Dacca, raise the Bangla Desh flag and celebrate their victory," comments one young Westerner who has spent many months in the Naxalite areas of the south, "but the Naxalites will just keep fighting." The Naxalites will certainly pose problems for Indian interests in Bangla Desh and presumably for the Soviets as well.

During the past nine months, much of the wobbly physical infrastructure of this land was destroyed by war or collapsed from inattention: bridges blown, roads cracked and crumbling, communications lines down, rail lines cut, airport runways pocked with craters, boats sunk, factories damaged, machinery rusted, crops untended.

A Reluctant Indian Army

Some of this could be repaired, and even rapidly, by India. But the Indian army here has so far proved reluctant to tackle even the simplest problems of reconstruction. For five days Dacca airport remained closed with bomb holes in its runways while Indian officers termed this a Bangle Desh problem that should be handled by the Bengalis. Meanwhile the leaderless Bengalis were simply going out to the airport to stand around and stare in wonderment at the bomb craters. And while Indian army engineers could, and may yet, tackle some pressing problems of this sort, India has more than enough economic and social problems to deal with back at home; it is hardly in the position to undertake large-scale foreign-aid commitments. However, there are a few reasons for some hesitant longer-term hopefulness. The economy of Bangla Desh certainly meshes better with that of India (and particularly the adjacent Indian state of West Bengal) than it did with that of West Pakistan, which is 1,000 miles away.

Indian consumer goods should be cheaper here than West Pakistani goods were; Bangla Desh jute may be refined more profitably in Calcutta than in Karachi; Indian coal could fuel Bangla Desh factories, and Indian wood and stone could be used for construction; what foreign-exchange earnings and foreign-aid money henceforth accrue to, Bangla Desh at least will remain here and won't wind up in West Pakistan, as happened in the past.

Still, it remains very much to be seen whether India will want to help Bangla Desh emerge as an independent economic entity or whether India, perhaps more subtly than West Pakistan, will seek to maintain Bangla Desh as a kind of agrarian economic appendage.

For the moment the Bangle Dash economy, if it can be called that, is in shambles. Production of export crops like jute and tea is badly  disrupted, and foreign markets have been lost and will have to be regained. Famine was averted this past fall, largely, it seems, be-cause 10 million hungry mouths had fled to India, thus leaving a bit more for the people who remained. But now the 10 million are re-turning, the food distribution system is in chaos and Western relief officials once again are raising the specter of severe food shortages. Kerosene and other commodities are in desperately short supply, and people lack cash to purchase what little is available.

In the longer term, Bangla Desh will have to deal with the most basic problems of over-population and food production. And to do so, it will require a stable and efficient government.

At the very least, the people of Bangla Desh are in for a period of hardship and sacrifice. Yet, after the sufferings of the past nine months, the Bengalis aren't in any mood for "belt lightening." The Bengalis are far from primitive savages of the sort who might think of freedom as something to be eaten. But the masses of Bangla Desh have been politicized, at least simplistically, in the course of the civil war. Great expectations have been raised, but it is difficult to see how even the most moderate expectations can be met.

Having delivered the newborn nation by force of arms, India now has a vested interest in sustaining it. Not just India's prestige is at stake; for if Bangle Desh dissolves into chaos or veers toward leftist extremism, then Indian West Bengal might follow, and India's eastern frontier states of Tripura and Assam could eventually be lost.

But India lacks the financial resources simply to purchase prosperity and stability for Bangla Desh. It certainly can, and probably will, provide administrators to advise and supplement Bangla Desh functionaries. But India's own administration isn't notably efficient, and even the best administrators might not be able to bring order to Bangle. Desh. This would leave the Indian army. But for the army to im-pose order on Bangle Desh would leave India open to charges of colonialism. And the Bengalis have had more than enough of martial law in the past nine months.

Moreover, the Indian army (and administration), like that of Pakistan, is predominantly Punjabi, and no love is lost between Bengalis and Punjabis. In the immediate aftermath of liberation, the Punjabi officers of the Indian army naturally were feted as saviors and friends. The Indian officers, for their part, expressed friendship and sympathy for the Bengalis. But Punjabi patience with Bengalis seems to rapidly wear thin.

One Indian general, on liberation day, was swapping comradely campaign conversation with a defeated Pakistani counterpart when they were interrupted by several Bengalis shouting about Pakistani army atrocities. "Shut up, or I'll have you shot," the Indian general told the Bengalis.

Recently the Muktis threatened to blow up the Intercontinental Hotel here, and a company of Indian soldiers was called in to protect it. Within minutes of his arrival, the Indian unit commander was prodding Bengalis with his swagger stick and telling them to "bugger off." And an Indian brigadier, after complimenting the fighting qualities of the defeated Pakistani army, was asked about the Mukti Bahini. "Yes, those Mukti chaps made good porters for us," he replied.

With such attitudes the Indian army is unlikely to endear itself for long with the people of Bangla Desh. Indeed, India has had more than enough trouble dealing with the Bengalis of Indian West Bengal, which has been under martial law for nearly a year.

Many Indian army officers appear aware of the problems and danger of being drawn into a military occupation of Bangla Desh. "We want to get our army out of here within two weeks," said one Indian general on liberation day. Whether the politicians in New Delhi share this view, whether India can afford to take a chance and let the Bengalis run Bangle Desh, whether the Bengalis can run Bangle. Desh, whether India can bring order to Bangla Dash if the Bengalis cannot—all these questions remain to be answered.

Some other nations may prove to have influence here, particularly the Soviet Union, which, as an ally of India, was an indirect backer of Bangla Desh. The Russians certainly can be expected to provide foreign aid to the new nation, and so may some Western powers. America already has expressed willingness to provide aid. But the Bangla Desh prime minister, speaking in Calcutta recently, said Bangla Desh would refuse to accept U.S. aid because of America's role in the civil war. ("A great ploy," one Western diplomat says. “Now all the bureaucrats in Washington will be around saying: ‘How come he doesn't want our money? What's wrong with our money? He damn well will take our money.’")

Whether or not Bangla Desh consents to accept American dollars, it is unlikely that the U.S. will be able to buy much influence; at least for some time to come. By refusing to condemn Pakistani army repression during the past nine months, by permitting Pakistan to use up old arms licenses, by branding India as the aggressor in the full-scale war, and by sending the 7th Fleet to the Bay of Bengal, Washington managed to convince the Bengalis that America is their enemy.

The view may be simplistic or exaggerated, but it is what the Bengalis believe. And scores of conversations with angry Bengalis indicate that the view won't be rapidly or easily altered.