A simple, back-of-an-envelope calculation is enough to make the most militant Pakistani pause for thought. Setting aside who has the staunchest allies, India has 29 divisions in Pakistan’s 19, two armoured on each side, but India has newer Russian tanks, and more of them. India has 800 aircraft to Pakistan’s 400, with a helicopter-borne strike force thrown in; India has nearly a million men under arms, Pakistan 400,000. Lastly, and most disturbing of all, a quarter of Pakistan’s men counting support and logistic units are away in East Pakistan and, as the East Pakistan Government, Doctor Abdul Motalibe Malik hinted last week, could not be extricated if the worst came to the worst because the Indian Navy dominates the intervening 3000 miles of sea.

In cold, military logic, India has all the face cards, and last week the Indians harshly, almost contemptuously, replied to Yahya Khan’s “Let’s be friends” proposal by offering as much causus belli as anyone could want, assuming that the offended party wanted or dared to fight. In the eyes of West Pakistanis this is very much like the beach bully in the muscle-building advertisements who kicks sand in the eyes of the nice guy while his girl friends look on - except that this time a muscular girl is doing the kicking. “We are 19-division weaklings!” a Pakistani who reads the American magazines wailed to me last week, and Yahya’s impotent rage against “that woman” is easy to understand for the Indians have many turns of the screw left before the last drastic step of all-out war which they undoubtedly prefer to avoid.

Many people who ought to know have indicated that the Indians want the whole thing settled before the Himalayan spring melts the snow in the mountain passes. The winter season is four months, and two weeks have gone already. The next turn of the Indian screw is probably not more than a week away, and may be less. However, the Indians may not make all the running in the military field. It goes hard for a country with a military regime which has spent 80 per cent of the budget on defence to bow the knee to superior strength, and Pakistan has at least one military option which Yahya is under increasing pressure from some of his generals to play, or at least to threaten.

Just as Lahore is the obvious target for an Indian thrust, cutting West Pakistan in two, the Indian weak spot is opposite the Pakistan salient at Sialkot, where the main Indian communications with Kashmir pass within 10 miles of the Pakistan frontier. A thrust here, coupled with a diversion across the Rajasthan Desert in the direction of Delhi (ideal tank country) would immediately take the Indian pressure off East Pakistan and might, its proponents argue, give Pakistanis something to bargain with. Yahya visited the Sialkot sector last week and the Pakistan press reported that he spoke to crack units there. General Tikka Khan, artillery and pacification specialist, has also been reported in the area. This would be a separate gamble but, for Pakistan, this is a desperate hour.

A search for a political solution is obvious under way. Yahya has said over and over again that he will hand over to a civilian government on December 27, but there is understandably less talk now of “restoration of democracy,” at least for the time being. It may be that the candidate capable of meeting the Indians’ conditions is Sheikh Mujib, who is alive and well in his air- conditioned cell in Lyallpur jail, 250 miles from Islamabad. The Sheikh s secret trial for treason has been going on in fits and starts during the recent weeks of crisis, but appears to have been suspended for the moment as witnesses have had difficulty in getting here from East Pakistan.

Naming the Sheikh Prime Minister would be tantamount to conceding the secession of Bangladesh, which so much blood has been shed to avoid. But the other front runners to head the new government all have grave drawbacks, although not perhaps in West Pakistan eyes as severe as Sheikh Mujib’s. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is certainly the most intelligent politician in Pakistan with a solid mass organization in Sind and the Punjab. He speaks of the language of conciliation with the East and says that if he becomes Prime Minister one of his first moves will be to try to negotiate a peaceful return of the refugees. But Bhutto has two grave drawbacks: many Bengalis hold him personally responsible for the tragedy of East Bengal, saying that his ambition for power prevented him from coming to terms with Sheikh Mujib before the bloodshed began; and his programme of socialism, a land reform and social justice - which won him his huge electoral victory - has alarmed many of the privileged in a country which still holds some ot the richest people in the world, as well as a great many of the poorest.

Another possibility is Nurul Amin, a former Chief Minister of East Pakistan, who has one of the two men elected from East Pakistan last year who were not members of the Awami League. The other was a Buddhist tribesman from the Chittagong Hills - not a very promising candidate to reunite a Muslim country. Amin is not much more hopeful. He is 78 and, while in possession of his faculties, strikes most observers, including this one, as mentally stalled in the great debate over partition of 20 years ago and more. Although Amin is a Bengali, widely respected and actually elected, most of his followers are people who have been subsequently declared unopposed in by-elections to fill seats vacated by members of the Awami League. “The Bengalis wanted one man one vote,” goes a Rawalpindi joke. “Well, Amin is the one man.”

So far, 58 people have been declared elected unopposed from East Pakistan - a process which Bhutto describes as a “Caesarian election,” although he accepted six of these uncontested seats for his own party. The other strong candidate is Doctor Abdul Malik, the Governor of East Pakistan. He is a civilian and a Bengali with a reputation as a tough negotiator, earned when he was Labour Minister dealing with the fledgling Pakistani trade union. But he has not been elected by anyone, and he sees problems of Pakistan in terms of “Islam is in danger” - although if it was simply a question of defending the faith, the conservative religious parties would not have been virtually wiped out in the last elections.

As a few people struggle for power in this dark hour - and more seem to be struggling to avoid power - many Pakistanis here continue to hope that the Bengal guerrilla movement will fall out of favour both with the Indian Government and with the middle class leaders of the former Awami League as they turn more towards the various bands of Marxism. “You Westerners ought to realise that we are the last bastion against communism in this subcontinent now that India has sold out to the Reds,” a Pakistani general told me earnestly the other night. We were at a reception attended by 40 Chinese from Peking in neat uniforms and Mao buttons, headed by the Minister for Heavy Industry, Li Shui Ching, who is here to hand over a £2 million machinery factory to Pakistan.

As Bhutto says, “The old Pakistan is dead.” Whether a new one can be lashed together, by such desperate expedients, under relentless pressure from a strong and angry neighbour, we should know by the end of the year.