Nation

The great powers, led by the United States, the
wealthiest of the lot, have long made a practice
of recruiting "client states" by disbursing "aid,"
mostly military and mostly employed by tyrannical
regimes to keep themselves in power. When a
relatively democratic country like the United
States has followed this method, it has deplored
the evils of autocracy in muted tones, but excused
the autocrats on the ground of necessity. The
alliance, though perhaps a little unsavory, gave
us "leverage" to maintain peace in world.

Now one sees how this leverage theory works out in
reality. India and Pakistan are at war. The war is
restricted the moment, but by all indications
restraint will soon vanish. Since 1953 the United
States has assisted Pakistan to the tune of about
$4 billion. It is now trying to exert leverage on
Pakistan, to make it refrain from full-scale
war. The Soviet Union is engaged in the same
endeavor the Indians. On the evidence, both great
powers are powerless. Yahya Khan's government
behaves as if we had never given it a red cent.

Our leverage has been exerted privately. The State
department's public stand has been that the war
involving West and East Pakistan is an internal
affair. This evasion will help to excuse our
failure to prevent further untoward developments,
but the pretense is transparently false.

The fact is that our aid to West Pakistan is
largely responsible for the present situation,
which threatens not only the peace of the
subcontinent but may embroil the superpowers
themselves. In 1953 the United States engaged in
confidential arms-aid negotiations with senior
generals and bureaucrats of Pakistan West who in
an elections the following year suffered defeat in
East Pakistan. Not at all nonplussed, the United
States concluded defense pact with the West
Pakistanis, who then and later treated East
Pakistan as a colony. It is doubtful that French
colonialism in North Africa, or British
colonialism India, was ever as vicious as
Pakistani colonialism, but the United States continued its aid. When
elections were again held, in 1970, and again
parties opposed to the continuance of military
rule prevailed at the polls, Washington still gave
no heed.

Since March 25, when the present trouble began,
the Nixon Administration has vacillated. Privately, it continued to send help
to the West Pakistani generals. Such explanation
as the government saw fit to give was to the
effect that, under Asian conditions, only military
men could be regarded as reliable allies. Besides,
we had commitments which had to be fulfilled. Then
it was said that we had ceased to give aid. But
since a freighter plying narrow waters is visible
to the unaided eye, the press and the Congress
soon discovered that aid was continuing. It was
finally shut off, not by the Administration but by
Congress in the Foreign Assistance Act.

Leverage having failed, American efforts are now
limited to moral suasion, which has as much effect
on Yahya Khan and his colleagues as a pea shooter
has on a tank. As Senator Kennedy points out
(Congressional Record, November 16), the problem
is between the military elite ruling in Islamabad
and the Bengali leadership elected in Dacca. The
one man who might have a chance to stop the rush
toward war, the Bengali leader Sheik Mujibur
Rahman, is being tried by the West Pakistani
rulers for treason.

The Indians could not stand by and allow the flood
of refugees from East Pakistan to inundate the
Indian countryside in the area of the Bay of
Bengal. Another 10 million destitute inhabitants
could break the back of a country with India's
problems. As it is, there is dangerous animosity
between the poverty-stricken Indians and the
refugees whom the government is trying to keep
from starving. The situation has gone too far for
reversion to the status quo ante. India is now
throwing its military resources into play to found
what one commentator calls "a friendly, secular
and independent East Pakistan."

The Indians will be portrayed as the aggressors,
but it is hard to see what else they could have
done. For the past ten years India's development
plans have been thwarted by a string of
misfortunes and calamities. Caring for the
refugees in the current fiscal year alone is
estimated to cost $900 million, of which only $250
million has been offset by donations and pledges
from abroad.

The one lesson that comes out of all this, as far
as the United States is concerned, is that
military aid for the sake of "leverage" is an
illusion. Now the Congress and the people, if not
the wise men of the Nixon Administration, can see
it for what it is.