Islamabad: While the Pakistani troops in the eastern wing face a sudden accumulation of bomb attempts and other acts of sabotage which, for the first time, indicate a more sophisticated resistance and signal further difficulties in"normalising" the situation, Islamabad is becoming increasingly irritable about its external critics.

India, sympathising openly with the secessionist forces, remains a major target. But it now shares this distinction with former colonial ruler Britain - whose public and official opinion still carries disproportionately great weight in Pakistan.

The Pakistani press launched a campaign against England's mass media in general and the BBC in particular. It was followed by a strong protest from the foreign office over certain parts of an "agreed statement", issued at the conclusion of talks India's Foreign Minister Swaran Singh recently had with his British colleague Sir Alec Douglas- Home and Prime Minister Edward Heath. The stumbling-blocks: their call for a political solution to the Pakistani crisis"acceptable to the people of East Pakistan" and the tributes Sir Alec paid to India's "restraint and generosity" in dealing with the refugee problem.

The Islamabad note alleged New Delhi's idea of a political settlement was agreement with the leaders of the defunct Awami League who, by agitating for East Pakistan's secession, had brought on the present crisis. India, it said, had not only been sending infiltrators into East Pakistan and sustaining a "Provisional Government of Bangla Desh" on its soil, but was even now training and equipping "as much as 40,000 miscreants and supporters of Bangla Desh within its territory".

Not content with this, the press reproached Sir Alec for having urged the aid-Pakistan consortium to suspend its financial and economic assistance to Pakistan pending a political solution to the East Bengal crisis. But here some of the guns were trained against Japan, the first member of the consortium literally to stop all development aid.

Mirza Ahmed, President Yahya Khan's economic adviser, added official weight to press complaints: if the present attitude of the aid-giving countries constituted an attempt "to influence our domestic political solution, it is wholly contrary to their own professions that aid to developing countries is without political strings".

Hard upon all these troubles came Canada's decision not only to prohibit the further export of defence equipment to Pakistan, but to suspend the shipment of 46 crates of F-86 Sabre jet parts destined for Karachi. Of the Western countries, only the United States seemed willing to deliver military goods. President Richard Nixon's special envoy Henry Kissinger was given a warm welcome in Islamabad this month as a representative of a country which had shown "understanding and helpfulness towards Pakistan's difficulties", as the Pakistan Times put it.

Whether this honeymoon will survive the present arms delivery remains to be seen, particularly as the US has fully adopted the consortium's wait-and-see policy towards Pakistan. Islamabad cannot however afford to fall out with the leading Western power, since the Soviet Union has from the beginning taken the same view as India of the Bangla Desh problem. For Islamabad the only international alternative would then be China which, notwithstanding its firm political support for the Pakistani generals, is by no means in a position to replace the western donor countries.