To visit Pakistan in these days of its unremitting, and quite possibly final, crisis is to enter a looking-glass world. Nothing here is as it seems from anywhere else. The past ten months have produced a grim calendar of reckless error. Yet in Pakistan there is no acknowledgment of recklessness, only of rectitude, Government propaganda films seek to pin the full blame for this year’s carnage in East Pakistan on the Bengalis, who were the chief victims of it. In his unbalanced fulminations President Yahya Khan seeks to blame India for a situation essentially of Pakistan’s making.

The height of absurdity is perhaps reached in a recent (ghosted) book by Mr. Bhutto, the firebrand West-wing politician. If anyone, it was he, who played the most devious part in precipitating the present crisis, but in his view it was Mrs. Gandhi’s fault, and even the Indian General Election last March was merely, in his looking-glass logic, a device to discomfort Pakistan. According to Islamabad’s newspeak, the East Pakistan "displaced persons: (refugees) number not 9,000,000 (India’s and Oxfam’s figure) not even 6,000,000 (the neutral sceptics’ figure) but 2,000,000. The Government has yet to explain how it can claim to have counted people who are not, by its own admission, there to be counted. Such absurdity is sadly typical of the way Pakistan has lost touch with realities today.

Those realities offer little comfort. By frustrating their own scheme for the transfer of political power to a civilian government, President Yahya and his martial law junta have maneuvered their nation into a morass of intractable problems. The civil democracy that President Yahya now proposes is the sickly stepchild of what he once promised. The new National Assembly will be hardly more than a hand-picked body: 79 of the 167 Awami league members elected last December (forming an absolute majority of the 313-member Assembly) have been debarred. The Awami League itself has been outlawed. The coming by-elections, therefore, will be a walkover for the Rightist and obscurantist alliance forged by the discredited and out-moded Moslem League parties. Few of the remaining 88 Awami Leaguers, who are being allowed to stay as Independents, are expected to take their seats: moist of them have joined the Bangladesh resistance movement or have simply gone into hiding. This implies a second massive round of by-elections.

Given the current reign of terror in the East wing, which has only marginally abated since the excesses of the summer, by-election polling is sure to be pitiably low and unrepresentative. Such an Assembly will hardly be worth the convening. It will have only nominal powers to amend the new Constitution instead of the power, once promised, to devise one. The Constitution itself is to be presented by President Yahya by Dec. 20 and will be based, he has stated, "on the national aspirations, as assessed by me." Such ersatz democracy can do little to satisfy the quickening aspirations of the millions who, voting freely for the first time a year ago, gave a clarion "Yes" for radical change.

There is also the thorny problem of Mr. Bhutto, whose People’s Party, based solely in the West wing, has 81 seats. In March, Mr. Bhutto helped to sabotage the National Assembly because he was being frozen out of constitution making by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Awami League leader. Mr. Bhutto now, as cynically opportunist and power-hungry as ever, sees himself in danger of being squeezed out once more, both by the Rightist alliance and by the generals, who clearly intend to retain the levers, if not the trappings, of real political power. Mr. Bhutto is thus likely to prove a continuing irritant. If, as is likely, he attempts to exploit popular discontents for his own political purposes, and overplays his hand, Mr. Bhutto could well find himself under restraint alongside Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

STILL A THREAT

The Sheikh imprisoned since March and now undergoing secret trial near Lyallpur on charges of treasonable conspiracy, is yet far from finished as a potent political problem for the junta. The trial itself is proceeding fairly. It is no charade. Mujib’s lawyers are putting up a successful fight. Nevertheless, for reasons of State there can be no doubt of the verdict. But what is President Yahya then to do? He is not so crass as to have Mujib executed and, indeed, has specifically undertaken, in a personal communication with President Nixon, not to do so. But he has publicly labelled Mujib as a traitor and is too deeply committed to climb down.

A commuted death sentence is the likely answer, but clearly contains the seeds of further problems. For, while there is scant chance now of any meaningful reconciliation between Pakistan’s two violently estranged wings, what chance there is depends on Sheikh Mujib, the only man who could, just perhaps put the pieces of Pakistan together again. Mujib alive even in prison, is a symbol, and an alternative, and therefore, an implied threat to the Presidency of Yahya Khan. And it is an ailing Presidency at that. The President himself shows disquieting signs of losing grip. As the nations hovers near the edge of war, as the political problems mount still higher, as the economy crumbles, vital decisions are ducked or taken irrationally, impatiently, viscerally. Significantly most of the sensible initiative of recent months - the replacement of Gen. Tikka Khan, the general amnesty, the granting lawyer for trial to Sheikh Mujib, relaxation of curbs on foreign correspondents - have been made on American advice, arising out of the strange but close personal relationship between President Yahya and President Nixon.

But these are cosmetics. The appointment, for example, of a civilian governor in East Pakistanis a patent ruse. The East wing remains part of a supposedly "united" Pakistan only by being kept down by the alien occupying force of West Pakistan soldiery. So long as this continues, so long will Pakistan remain in a condition of political catalepsy and economic thrombosis. The economic damage is not yet manifest, if only because government statistics are palpably fraudulent. Also Pakistan, like any largely agricultural country, can take a considerable economic battering without crackling. But almost all foreign aid is now cut off, jeopardising development.

China, Persia and Pakistan’s Arab friends, however sympathetic are not in the charity business, hard currency reserves are almost exhausted, and Pakistan is virtually dependent on imported raw materials. Vital revenue earners like jute, still in the pipeline, are not being replenished. The immense cost of stationing an army in East Pakistan is being met simply by printing money - the road to ruin. In manufacturing, discontent is simmering: a third of the nation’s textile workers have been laid off because machinery, dependent on foreign spares, cannot be maintained, even wheat production, mainstay of the West wing’s agriculture, is in grave difficulties due to shortage of imported fertilizers.

Such are the desperate' straits into which Pakistan has now goes, under President Yahya or under new leadership, military or civil, there seems no promise of a stable, or even a better, future. Even if the East wing problem can somehow be resolved, there are mounting inter-provincial strains between the Punjab and other provinces in the West wing which could prove just as ruinous. To have written as a Cassandra at almost every stage of Pakistan’s development in the past three years have been a sad task. For Pakistan has not lacked potential and both its common people, men of spirit, and its "top people" in Government and commerce, men of intelligence, have great qualities, scarce in South Asia, of energy and enterprise. It is not primarily their fault that they should be cursed. But every grim foreboding has been more than fully realised. One is sorry to have to say it, but it is hard now to count even a tinge of deliver.