There have always been two views of Yahya Khan. Either he was what he professed : a gruff and straight-forward Pathan soldier - pear-shaped, sunk in his cups of an evening, eager to get back to barracks once his national duty was done, or he was the schemer his enemies suspected : a general who relished power but knew he could not hang on to it without some brief democratic gestures. As soon as last December’s election results made the new shape of Pakistani influence obvious, Yahya’s henchmen were pushing a compromise line - Mujib and Bhutto form a coalition, then ask the President to stay on as titular boss, gulping up the honour and the glory.

Neither character analysis , however, really convinced. And new events have amalgamated the two into a bloodshed and tragic personality. Perhaps Yahya does lust after authority; perhaps the wave of Bengali killings are a desperate throw of a quasi-dictator hanging on; but the simple - no, stupid - soldier is also apparent. For who else would allow a national election to find a leader, chat to that leader openly for three weeks of wheeler-dealing, then within minutes and without any fundamental change of situation, accuse him of “treason” and order in the machine gunners? It is the act of a mindless sergeant major.

In a nation where little works smoothly there is credulous admiration of the military machine. An over-weaned defence budget trains and pays the fighters well; they live in sleek comfort - five minutes from Karachi’s slums you find a literal Sunset Boulevard of officers’ villas - but, in fact, their calibre is fixed and mixed and questionable. Rich Punjabi families still send their brightest sons to university and the Bar. Only a rejected residue, lads who find school-books a trial, are steered into a military career. When truly bright leaders - like Air Marshals Uur Khan and Asgar Khan - do arise, they shoot up through the ranks and quit young, bent on politics or big business. It is the time servers, simple and simplistic soldiers, who linger.

These gentlemen are thick on the ground in Rawalpindi. There are more of them than there used to be (Yahya has doubled their ranks in his two years of office). They are narrow men, mostly devout Moslems, implacably convinced of Indian hostility. They had a nasty shock in the stalemate of the 1965 war when confident predictions of victory turned briskly to despairing pleas for peace. They had an even nastier shock when they realised that their iron front-man - Ayub Khan - was being manipulated by the unscrupulous Bhutto.

Thus certain preconceptions have hardened to deep belief, in conversation they equate patriotism and Islamic unity with the continuation of a strong army - even though defence does swallow 60 per cent of Pakistan’s total budget, Sunset Boulevard and American tanks to play games with fuse - with the grandiose futility of the Kashmir issue - into unthinking, unquestioning championing of the status quo. They despise political leaders; they realise that these “chaps” had to be given a chance, but they also reckoned that after a few months of political chicanery a grateful Pakistan would summon back the field marshals and slick civil servants who oiled Ayub’s regime.

Seen in this light, Yahya’s current performances gains the credibility of consistency. In his negotiations with Mujib he acted for the greater good of a glorious, religious nation. Who could really avoid slapping down his bounder when he insisted upon severing Jinnah’s “pure state” and its central government financing the army? Punjabis do tend to think of Bengalis as a lesser breed - “good for a couple of hours’ proper work a day”, say the bureaucrats of Islamabad. So the rebels had three weeks of Bangladesh and freedom, so a few cuffs would put the rebels back in their place.

Throughout and with fatal strength, there runs a flaw in these assumptions. Yahya’s military intelligence is feeble: nobody in the West expected the size or sweep of Sheikh Mujib’s election triumph. Yahya’s military organisation is sunk in arrogance; there is no doubt that the scorn with which he rejected claims of flood relief incompetence was genuine, but, equally British relief reached the stricken delta before meaningful Pakistani relief, and when the troops for an effective military take over were needed, three weeks ago, they were still in the West, growling against threatened “Indian invasion.”

Consistently in Rawalpindi one is told of Eastern decadence and corruption. Bengali nationalism has not been treated on its merits because it is still seen, in the inner sanctums as a transient confection brought secretly into modem life by Ayub Khan when he wallowed in Western discontent after the war and needed to trump up Eastern secession as a spurious “threat to unity” - Franco and Gibraltar all over again. May be there is a wisp of truth to this. Mujib has used long spoons as well as rhetoric in his brave and battling career. Right up until the final moment there was no Dacca claim for “independence” pure and simple. It was always a form of words hedged about, for the Sheikh did not want it. Now any lasting compromise seems doomed.

Can the army hold 73 million in check permanently across a thousand miles of India? It is imbecile to consider it. Can the treacherous Mujib be brought to trial? Three months ago he won a majority of all Pakistani votes. Yahya’s decision, in short, stems from miscalculations and misapprehensions. He has taken a manipulating politician and made him a martyr. He has taken a muffled, conservative move for autonomy, and made it, sooner or later, into a revolution. But the attitudes that guide these actions did not come out of the blue. They are the fruits of an elite which, for all its virtues, have lived for years in a world of spruce unreality. There are two tragedies : one, that Yahya got gunners to the south of Chittagong faster than he got medical supplies to the ravaged delta. And, second, there sticks in my mind a naval commander I met in Karachi. “For a long time we had no chance to participate,” he told me. “Now I can play my full share.” After the past few days he will be a marked man for the rest of his service life: an Easterner.