The warning signals are overwhelming. Massacre and destruction continue in East Pakistan, where nobody knows how many have died but the estimates now run over 200,000. Over 6 million people, equal to the total population of Chicago, Detroit and Houston combined, have deluged India.
Guerrilla fighting is developing in a context of international tensions which threaten the eruption of war between India and Pakistan, the possible breakup of India and perhaps the establishment of an enormous pro-Peking state on the Indian Ocean, combining the Pakistani and Indian parts of Bengal.
This is undeniably a threat to world peace, more serious even than the nervous Middle East, as well as a human tragedy so vast it is incomprehensible.
The United States, however, has refused to join other members of the World Bank consortium in saying no new economic aid will be granted Pakistan until it makes the political moves necessary to ease the situation. Further, the United States is the only non-Communist country continuing to deliver military goods to West Pakistan, whose army has occupied and devastated East Pakistan, 1,000 miles away, to suppress the demands for some autonomy and self-government.
Although there were assurances to Congress that deliveries would be stopped, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Van Hollen told a Senate subcommittee that all military sales already licensed would continue to be sent so that Pakistan would not turn to "other sources of supply." That means to Peking, and it is startlingly disingenuous because China is already Pakistan's major source of arms.
The United States also isn't withholding aid, on which Pakistan depends to avoid bankruptcy, because that "would be seen as sanctions and intrusions in internal problems," Van Hollen said.
The sanctimonious decision for "nonintervention" by continuing support to the Pakistan military regime comes especially strangely from the Nixon administration which has warned so often against "neo-isolationism." And, of course, prim repugnance against affecting a foreign country's "internal affairs" is not the real reason for America's standby policy to Pakistan.
It is because Pakistan is at the hub of a tug-of-war involving Russia, China and the United States.
Twenty years of intricate big power games have produced a situation now so explosive that all are virtually paralyzed. In the 50s, the United States drew Pakistan into the anti-Soviet alliances with which the late John Foster Dulles sought to contain Russia and China.
Dulles considered neutralism immoral in the crusade against communism, and India under Nehru was determinedly nonaligned. Pakistan was expected to be reliably anti-Communist.
But from the start Pakistan has been more anti-Indian than anything else. So when the United States cut off military supplies to both sides in the India-Pakistani war, the Pakistanis turned to Peking for backing.
The Russians, as their relations with China sharpened, increased support for India. The United States tried to play it down the middle, fearful that offending either Pakistan or India too much would drive either one into the arms of its major Communist friend.
That remains the basic policy, but the situation has raced far beyond that effort to keep a balance. Now America's major allies, who are suspending further aid to Pakistan, say privately that they expect the regime of President Yahya Khan to collapse in economic breakdown within two to three months. But the United States secretly fears that if Yahya is pushed to the brink, he will turn to full dependence on Peking rather than let go.
The point has come where that kind of cold strategic thinking, oblivious to the human catastrophe, is also the most dangerous strategy for the United States. Nor is there any evidence that China would seek to dominate Pakistan, despite its expression for support for Yahya.
The agony of Vietnam has turned American attention away from the real threats to world peace and national security. Pretending there is nothing the United States can or should do about Pakistan is an extraordinary combination of both neo-isolationism and cold war maneuvering, especially when America's major allies and the World Bank seek joint action. U.S. refusal to join the international effort to stop Yahya from terrorizing East Pakistan's 75 million comes near to condoning a policy which has created grave international menace. It courts disaster, not only for India and Pakistan. And it is more likely to wind up with a spread of Communist control into truly strategic areas than would the collapse of South Vietnam. For once grand strategy, national interest and urgent humane needs are on the same side. Why isn't the United States on that side with its main allies?