When President Yahya Khan ordered his troops into action in east Pakistan on March 25, to quell what he considered a dangerous threat to the integrity of the country, it is unlikely that he foresaw the consequences: a people living in terror of the army and economic life disrupted, and ahead only the prospect of a prolonged military occupation of the colonial type, harassed by the increasing activity of guerrilla groups.

Nor, alas, is there much sign that the President, who depends entirely on his military commanders for information, has any clearer grasp of the consequences now. A blunt, amiable soldier, President Yahya is intellectually and temperamentalIy unequipped to make the sort of responses that might just conceivably salvage something from the disaster in the east. His credit with the Bengalis, certainly, is completely exhausted.

It is in a way, a personal, as well as a national, tragedy. For there is little doubt that President Yahya genuinely desired a return to democratic rule. The elections that were held last December under his direction were remarkably fair and free — their fairness and freeness being liberally trumpeted at the time by those who now attribute the sweeping victory of Shaikh Mujibur Rahman's Awami League to demagoguery and the “reign of terror” imposed by the party’s “Nazi stormtroopers”.

The President made several serious errors. The first was to have allowed the political parties 120 days within which to agree upon the outlines of a constitution to be passed by a constituent assembly. Out of this grew the bickering and quarrelling that directly precipitated the Army’s intervention in March.

A second, a related, error was not to have foreseen the constitutional difficulties posed by a country in which neither of the two main parties has a national base. Mr Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the leader in the west wing of the Pakistan Peoples Party, seized upon this to press his claim for representation in a coalition government in spite of having, won only 82 of the 313 seats in the National Assembly.

Mr Bhutto's argument was that the Awami League could not reasonably expect, even on the basis of its absolute majority in the assembly (where it won 167 seats), to dictate terms to the whole of Pakistan when it was represented in only one half. It was a pretty thin argument. But it had just enough legal and constitutional substance to provide the President with an excuse to postpone the meeting of the constituent assembly that was planned for March 3.

It should, in fairness, be noted that the Shaikh’s own motives are far from clear. There is broad agreement among witnesses of the pre-March events in Islamabad and Dacca that there was a period when he could have become Prime Minister of Pakistan, without sharing power with Mr Bhutto, if he had been prepared to make concessions on certain points.

These were, admittedly, key points, such as the right of the provincial governments to determine trade policies and the amount of revenue to be consumed by the armed forces.

There is not much doubt that by the middle of March the use of armed force, as a final option, was firmly implanted in the minds of the President and his advisers. A large scale airlift of troops from the west wing though absolutely denied by the military authorities in Dacca— was carried out clandestinely throughout the month. Even this does not necessarily mean, however, that negotiations between the President and the Shaikh were cynically prolonged merely to allow the army to make its preparations. Not that the President, if not all of his generals, did not hope for a last minute settlement.

The case, such as it is, for President Yahya, while historically important, can have no relevance to what happened after March 25. Precisely what the Army's orders were we may never know. A swift police action? A shortlived dose of terror to bring a rebellious population back into line? Or genocide, the organized massacre of an entire political and cultural group?

Genocide is a large claim. It implies the existence of an apparatus of extermination and of a degree of planning and pre-meditation that has yet to be proven. But that the army conducted a systematic persecution of an important segment of the population of East Pakistan there can no longer be any reasonable doubt. Armed rebellion came in response to and did not provoke, the army's action.’

What, if anything, can or is likely to be done to remedy the situation? The short answer is nothing—by which is meant nothing resembling a genuine or lasting solution. Such a remedy would have to include at the very least the release from jail of Shaikh Mujib. the transfer of political power to the duly elected representatives of the people, the withdrawal of the army to its barracks and a public expression of regret by the President.

It would be a lot to expect of any government. Let alone the government sitting in Islamabad. There are degrees of military occupation. No doubt General Tikka Khan, a bullying authoritarian of circumscribed intelligence, could one day be replaced as military governor in the east wing by someone more moderate. No doubt the army could modify its policy of arrests, interrogations and summary shootings that still continue if at a diminishing level.

But such measures would not begin to provide an answer to the basic question: how can the two halves of Pakistan be kept together save by naked force? The government and the army are the victims of their own propaganda. They are convinced that Bengali nationalism was the artificial creation of a minority of extremists who can be isolated and eliminated.

In the background looms the worrying prospect of armed conflict with India. This is a cause of real concern. For it is difficult to see how such a conflict could not but work to the disadvantage of Pakistan whose armed forces are now desperately stretched between the two wings with the effect that neither is adequately defended.

The army has so far made no attempt to pursue guerrilla groups beyond the borders of East Pakistan or to raid their sanctuaries on Indian soil. This, the army knows, would be to invite Indian retaliation. For the present the only conclusion that makes sense—barring the possibility of an accidental flare-up— is that war between India and Pakistan would be the result of a deliberate decision by the Indians to provoke it.
Michael Hornsby