RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — The trauma of defeat has bitten deeply into Pakistan. It is as if the entire nation had pulled a blanket over its wounded head to avoid seeing or being seen.

The war with India ended 10 days ago but Pakistan's cities are still blacked out at night and cars, houses, shops and advertising signs remain covered with mud camouflage. Most activities have closed down or stopped; mail remains undelivered; offices remain more or less idle.

“There is no military reason for it at this point,” a ranking member of Pakistan's new ruling party said. “But psychologically it is vital to us right now to imagine we're doing something for the war effort. We have got to believe that we're still fighting, that we are still acting and reacting. Otherwise we would go mad with despair.”

This is the country that Zulfikar All Bhutto, a wealthy land‐owner who heads the small but influential socialist People's party, took charge of last Monday after being given the job by the discredited army general, President Mohammad Agha Yahya Khan. Arriving here exhaused from the United States, where he had pleaded Pakistan's case before the United Nations and met with Richard Nixon, the new President—who is also Minister of Defense, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of the Interior, Minister of Interprovincial Coordination and chief administrator of martial law —began with a flurry of decrees.

He fired 20 of the top military officers, including General Yahya, for misguided policies that led the country into war with India and then lost the war — along with the most populous half of the nation, East Pakistan. He ordered most political prisoners freed, revoked the ban on his party, abolished the death penalty, corporal punishment and censorship, and ordered changes to liberalize the administration of the universities — all with the object of erasing Pakistan's image at home and abroad as a brutal police state in which no opposition is brooked. He pledged swift and thorough land reform, began a purge of the sluggish and corrupt bureaucracy, clamped down on the flight of capital from the country (forbidding Pakistanis to leave) and promised a government accountable to the people—though making clear that he would remain a virtual dictator for a few months while the new democratic institutions were being built.

It was a dazzling display. What the practical results will be, no one can yet say. But Mr. Bhutto seems to have a far better chance of building a new nation than any of his predecessors.

The army is dispirited and sick of governing. The new President has a genuine popular mandate: He was personally elected to a seat in Pakistan's new National Assembly a year ago, in the first free election in the nation's 24‐year history (whose results were canceled by Yahya Khan) and his party won a resounding majority in the seats allotted to West Pakistan. Without the dead weight of East Pakistan, the industrial development of the west is likely to move rapidly, especially since massive aid from the United States and other Western nations will probably resume soon. All in all, Mr. Bhutto is probably the most powerful leader Pakistan has had since the founding of the nation by Mohammad Ali Jinnah in 1947.

But ,the difficulties ahead are of staggering dimensions. Pakistan came into being as a homeland for the Moslems of the Indian subcontinent, and Islam is the glue that is supposed to hold everything together. Mr. Bhutto, a Moslem but a diplomat and politician whose interests are more secular than religious — and whose English is better than his Urdu — must walk a tightrope between religious fundamentalism and the needs of practical politics, between socialism and the feudal structure of Pakistan's society, between the urbane wealth of the class that produced him and the wretched poverty of the masses he now commands.

Mr. Bhutto's most sensitive immediate problem is how to adjust to the fact of “Bangladesh,” the claim of the 75 million people of East Pakistan—backed by Indian power—that they are a new “Bengal Nation” independent of Islamabad.

There is every reason to believe that Mr. Bhutto, as most thoughtful Pakistanis, long ago recognized that East Pakistan will be going its separate way. But he must go through the motions of attempting to bring the province back, Symbolically, he has appointed a Bengali—Nurul Amin, 78, leader of a small right‐wing Bengali party—as his Vice President, a post of little real power. He has said all steps must be taken to retrieve the East.

But, significantly, he has also said that if these measures fail, a second phase must begin. The key figure in either phase is Sheik Muiibur Rahman, the 51‐year‐old head of the Awami League, the political party that scored an overwhelming victory in last year's elections on a platform of autonomy for East Pakistan. Sheik Mujib, who was tried and jailed in West Pakistan in the political crisis touched off by the election results, was transferred from jail to house arrest last week—and, it was reported, brought to Rawalpindi for negotiations with Mr. Bhutto.

In exchange for Sheik Mujib's freedom — which would permit him to become President of the new state of Bangladesh — Mr. Bhutto can be expected to drive the hardest possible bargain with India, Aside from the repatriation of the 70,000 or so troops taken prisoner by the Indians in East Pakistan and the 2 million non‐Bengali residents of the province, Pakistan seeks various territorial guarantees from India.

Pakistan is in no position to make any additional demands. But neither are the Pakistanis likely to abandon any of their claims. What may be expected, then, is a situation comparable to that between the Arab states and Israel, a state of neither peace nor war. Full‐fledged hostilities between India and Pakistan are unlikely to break out again for a long time but the two nations are hardly likely to paper over their mortal hostility.