The United Nations is drifting toward a disastrous failure on the Indian subcontinent because it is attempting to treat a potentially mortal wound with Band‐Aids.

While India and Pakistan move closer to all‐out war, the world organization has been wrangling over relief measures for an estimated nine million refugees who have fled to India from East Bengal and for the 66‐odd million Bengalis they left behind in that rebellious Pakistani province.

There is no question that the humanitarian needs the East Bengalis, both those who have fled and those who have remained behind despite brutal military repression, have a heavy claim on the conscience mankind.

But it is clear from the testimony of U.N. officials that relief assistance cannot alone solve the acute humanitarian crisis created by the upheaval in East Pakistan. Assistant Secretary General Paul Marc Henry warned the other day that humanitarian efforts in East Pakistan, already gravely threatened by stepped‐up military activities there, may have to cease altogether. Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, the U.N.'s High Commissioner for Refugees, stated that repatriation of the refugees who have fled to India offers the only “viable and lasting solution” to the present crisis.

In order to deal effectively with the humanitarian needs of the Bengalis it will be necessary to attack the root of the problem—the political crisis in Pakistan. It is essential to press for a political solution in East Pakistan that will put an end to the fighting there and permit the refugees to return in safety.

The United Nations so far has avoided this central issue, although Secretary General U Thant warned months ago that the situation on the subcontinent posed a threat to international peace—a prophecy that is now being borne out by a dangerously rising spiral of incidents along the Indian‐Pakistani borders. Mr. Thant's efforts to mediate the conflict have been spurned so far by India on the grounds that they tended to equate India and Pakistan and to divert attention from the source of the trouble—the repression in Pakistan. But Prime Minister Indira Gandhi has indicated that India would welcome United Nations intervention if it focused on this basic problem.

If the United Nations is to play an effective role for peace and rehabilitation on the subcontinent, the world’ organization must throw its weight behind mounting international pressures on Pakistan's President Yahya Khan to reach an accommodation with the elected leaders of East Pakistan, especially the imprisoned Sheik Mujib Rahman. Only in the context of a deter mined effort to promote a political settlement in Pakistan will the U.N. be able to move effectively to achieve a withdrawal of forces from the explosive Indo-Pak borders and to bring succor to the stricken Bengalis.