Baltimore Sun

Most other members of the Aid to Pakistan Consortium are in favor of withholding further assistance until a political solution is found to that country's convulsion of terror and turmoil. Not so the United States. A spokesman for the State Department says that by providing economic aid the United States would be able to exert leverage on President Yahya Khan for a "political accommodation" with East Pakistan on the basis of autonomy, thus promoting conditions under which millions of refugees who have fled to India might return.

The spokesman declares further that continued shipments of American "nonlethal" military equipment, under licenses previously granted, is proper. Not to permit shipment of this licensed stuff, he says, and not to continue economic assistance, in a situation of "civil strife," would be seen "as sanctions and intrusion" in the internal problems of another nation. He says still further that if the United States didn't send along the military materiel, Yahya Khan might turn to other sources, such as Communist China.

It is a dubious case, as the spokesman himself admits it to be when he acknowledges that any leverage is not yet measurable, that few refugees have returned home and that Pakistan has for some time been getting military supplies from China--since 1966 anyway, he might have added.

As to a Yahya accommodation with East Pakistan, a dispatch by John E. Woodruff printed on this page today analyzes sharply the sort of accommodation the Pakistani president seems to have in mind. As to the refugees' return, a slight lifting of the veil in East Pakistan in recent days discloses there an iron reign of intimidation and of continued killing, with the victims more likely to be Hindu than not: and the great majority of the refugees were, before they fled, members of the Hindu minority in East Pakistan.

As to whether or not what happens in Pakistan is internal, to see it so may be theoretically proper, but in fact the refugees and the circumstances that caused them to be-come refugees have made it a matter of international concern, threatening the stability and the peace of all South Asia.

Precisely what American policy ought to be is indeed difficult to say, but formulation of a policy will hardly be made easier by a re-fusal to see what the elements of the situation actually are.

Yahya Khan's Formula For Pakistan

By John E. Woodruff

HONG KONG.--President A. M. Yahya Khan's announcement of new plans for governing troubled Pakistan constitutes a final repudiation of the majority rule he said was his goal when he seized power two years ago.

Instead, he has chosen to make indefinite the 12-year- old rule of both wings by the West Pakistan-dominated army. The main new element will be an attempt to give the army some civilian camouflage and thus hand the country's free-world money donors an excuse to back away from the de facto aid suspension they adopted in Paris last week, with the United States aside. But even without foreign aid, he warned, the army intends b work its will.

His decision seems certain to set up an intense behind- the-scenes debate among member Countries of the Pakistan-aid group during the four months he says it will take to put his plan into effect.

President Yahya's new plan will have these major effects:

1. Abandonment of any effort to have the National Assembly draft the constitution that was to be its first major task and assignment of that Job to a committee of experts instead. This will effectively wipe out the results of last December's elections. The Awami League had won an absolute majority in the Assembly on a platform demanding broad constitutional autonomy that would have enabled East Bengal to wrest control of its economy from the 22 industrialist families that share control of West Pakistan with the army.

2. Advance warning that the constitutional experts must provide a strong central government. This will assure that East Bengal's economy and government will remain under control of West Pakistan, 1,000 miles away.

3. Indefinite extension of the ban that was imposed on the Awami League--Pakistan's majority political party-- on March 26, the night the army shot and burned its way into control of Dacca. But individual Awami Leaguers who did not partake of what the army cans "anti-state activities" may still take any Offices to which they were elected-- in effect, a call for any collaborationists among the Bengalis to step forward. So far, the army claims to have won over some two dozen of the more than 300 Awami Leaguers elected to the national and provincial assemblies.

4. Use of by-elections to put men acceptable to the army in the seats of the autonomists and any uncooperative or dead Awami Leaguers. Coupled with President Yahya's renewal of the treason accusation against Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, head of the Awami League, this means that the only man who has led a majority party in Pakistan since the Muslim League disintegrated nearly 20 years ago will be stricken from the assembly roster in favor of someone yet to be approved by the army.

To the Bengalis who gave the Awami League 167 of East Pakistan's 169 seats in the National Assembly last December, such a program can only reconfirm what became obvious the night the army struck: their choice must be between total subservience and total independence. Several impartial observers who have visited East Bengali recently have privately given varying estimates of the carnage, but all guess that the number killed by the army alone runs into hundreds of thousands.

Their guesses may ultimately prove to be better indicators of the horror of what they saw than of the actual numbers dead.

But when the thousands of non-Bengalis killed by the enraged East Pakistanis are added to the tens of thousands apparently killed by the army, at least one prospect seems certain: The middle road attempted by the Awami League--economic freedom for East Bengal but a loose political and defense association under a united Pakistan--is no longer thinkable for either side.

In these circumstances, General Yahya's plan promises to become a formula for pro-longed carnage on both sides-- and very likely for continuing increases in the number of Bengali refugees in India, which claims it already has more than six million of them.

What already stands as one of the greatest man-made catastrophes in history thus promises to grow still greater rather than to diminish .

But there is no sign yet that the outside world will persuade itself to do anything but wring its hands, send token relief aid and seek absolution by invoking the provisions of international law that make the suffering of millions on both sides of the India-Pakistan border an "internal" affair and thus the exclusive concern of the generals and industrialists in West Pakistan.

When the army moved in last March to crush the elected leaders' attempt to exercise the power they had won at the polls, American diplomats on the Indian subcontinent cautioned newsmen that the U.S. must act carefully to retain whatever "restraining influence" it might have with the generals in Islamabad.

Now, three months later, Pakistani ships are still carrying fresh ammunition and equipment from American ports to resupply the army that the State Department claimed it was trying to restrain.

The State Department even felt obliged last week to leak a denial of the published accounts of the World Bank-led aid consortium's informal decision to withhold aid to Pakistan. It offered no explanation of what other meaning could exist for the consortium's postponement of any further meetings without taking action on urgent Pakistani pleas for aid.

That aid is the easiest lever the outside world has to press for relaxation of the East Bengal terror, for Pakistan's economy was a shambles even before the army's costly move into East Pakistan.

Today that economy is virtually shattered. A proposed $250 million foreign-exchange infusion -- now suspended by the aid group -- would have relieved the only pressure that promised to have any restraining effect on the army.

Even that pressure will be eased considerably by Peking's recent decision to hasten its own large infusion of aid to Islamabad's military-industrial oligarchy.

But China is just getting its own development going again after the Cultural Revolution and hardly has the spare money it would take to help Islamabad impose on 75 million Bengalis the kind of solution Washington tried in Vietnam.

And Pakistan is already so desperately in debt that high officials talk openly of defaulting outright even on World Bank low-interest loans.

For the moment, however, the aid from China has apparently emboldened the generals to increase their own share of Pakistan's budget and thus, presumably, their ability to impose their will on the Bengalis. Last week Islamabad announced that the military will get $26 million more next year than the $425 million it got this year.