WASHINGTON — Dacca, the capital of East Pakistan, was re ported to be blacked out last week. Its power station apparently had been knocked out by the insurgents of the Bengali “Liberation Army.” Another major town, Comilla, was reported to have been without power for a week—for the same reason. Despite the severe repressions of the Pakistan Army, the Bengali insurgency lives, and the issue is likely to remain in doubt for a long time to come.

How is United States policy adjusting to this new crisis in South Asia? Does the Nixon Doctrine — those meager phrases spoken by the President at Guam in 1969 that have now become prescription for United States policy for the entire world provide any clues?

There are four possible out comes of the East Pakistan situation:

(1) West Pakistan could prevail, establishing a puppet government in East Bengal and containing the insurgency with continuing repression and terror.

(2) The Bengali insurrection might eventually succeed, but its present moderate leadership could be wiped out in the process.

In either of these outcomes, China would be the beneficiary. In the first, because it would reap the reward of its calculated support of the West Pakistan military elite; in the second, because Maoist cadres in East Bengal would accede to leadership.

(3) The situation could even lead, through Indian intervention, to a regional or hemispheric war.

The present course of American policy risks implication in any of these three developments.

(4) There could be a political accommodation leading to an autonomous East Bengal (eventually, perhaps, as part of a structure such as Nehru envisioned: a loose confederation of South Asian states.) This might be the only constructive outcome.

As the crisis in East Bengal deepens, the mystery of Washington's attitude deepens in equal measure. There is the continuing leakage of American arms shipments to the Pakistan Government through the sailing of half a dozen vessels after the sup posed ban of March 25. There is also the reluctance of the United States to join the World Bank consortium in suspending economic assistance to Islamabad in order to induce a political accommodation with the East Bengalis.

One theory in Washington is that the arms shipments were mindless bureaucratic acts. An other postulates low‐level policy sabotage by unregenerate Pakistan partisans in the Pentagon. More likely, it begins to appear, is a third hypothesis—reflected in the State Department's reply of May 6 to Senator Fulbright—suggesting an effort to continue a finely regulated trickle of arms that would preserve American influence on future Pakistani actions.

But this action so far exhibits only a minimal concern to keep communications open. The question of the underlying policy still remains.

The President, in his foreign policy message of February, 1971, elaborated for four pages on his major concern in South Asia: to bring “our activity into a stable balance with that of the other major powers with interests in the area.” That indicates a deliberate shift in the philosophical basis of American foreign policy. The principal elements of this new approach are:

* An orientation to the great powers and a relative disregard for the vicissitudes of the lesser countries, except insofar as they concern the larger powers that exercise interest in them. This would be a notable change from the emphasis of the 1960's on the netherworld of nonpowers as an arena for extravagant and de tailed United States effort.

• A dedication — almost a hang‐up—to “stability.” Containment of Communism becomes geopolitical rather than ideological.

• A preference that stability be achieved through a balancing of the great powers.

• A preservation of our alliance structure, for Its cheap and convenient deterrent effect.

A calculation that such a state of affairs will continue to allow the ample play of United States influence, without undue commitment or expenditure of means.

Yet, all this cool theorizing provides little guidance for the Administration's conduct in the present crisis in East Pakistan. Events with the most momentous eventual geopolitical consequences— the break‐up of the fifth most populous state in the world, the movement of six million refugees across an inter national border, the probable slaughter of a quarter of a million people, the threat of a war involving a billion people—are occurring under our gaze, and we seem to be either paralyzed or impotent. How can this be?

The answer, some observers contend, lies in a contradiction implicit In the Nixon Doctrine that the crisis in East Pakistan is beginning to reveal.

The basic feature of the Nixon Doctrine is its effort to maintain political‐military involvement in the affairs of Asia by means short of intervention on the Vietnam model. The instruments for this policy are military proxies, arms assistance, active power balancing and military alliances as an inexpensive form of deterrence. The intent is to retain a critical degree of control over Asian developments.

So Washington continues to send arms and economic aid to Pakistan. That may preserve leverage and keep communications open — keep the United States in the power game. But those moves are not likely to be decisive in determining the course of the crisis.

The only way for the United States to have any constructive influence on the situation, ac cording to this view, is by exerting the kind of “moral” force represented by an arms embargo or collaboration with the World Bank consortium. Such a policy would condition military and economic assistance on Islamabad's willingness to seek a political accommodation in East Ben gal.

But the Nixon Doctrine's prescription for involvement may be inversely proportional to the amount of moral influence the United States is free to exert. This is the dilemma that may make application of the doctrine not only obscure but disfunctional in South Asia.