ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 25—There is a curiously isolated quality about this city—the capital of Pakistan —that seems to place it in an other world from that of the teeming, impoverished and strife‐torn Indian‐Pakistani subcontinent. For one thing, Islamabad is more of a diplomatic enclave than a city and its population of 100,000 is made up largely of Government officials and diplomatic families. In common with Australia's Canberra and Brazil's Brasilia, Islamabad has been built in the past few years as a new capital.

The Talk of Islamabad

The gleaming concrete block of the Italian‐designed Government secretariat buildings, where matters of war and peace are decided, stands out starkly against the high Margalla Hills a few thousand yards away. Elsewhere, the city still looks raw and unfinished, strewn in patches across the vast empty spaces the Government hopes will one day be populated.

Many diplomatic families complain that too much of the city plumbing and other facilities are also still raw and unfinished.

While Government officials and diplomats talk endlessly in their offices and homes of war, real war seems as distant as the moon.

In fact, the current battles between the Pakistan Army on one side and the Indian Army and Bengali guerrillas on the other are happening in East Pakistan, more than 1,000 miles from here.

Many of the Pakistani officials living and working here, as well as most of the foreigners, have never even visited East Pakistan, much less seen the war there.

“I suppose when we speculate on war with India,” one Pakistani said, “we are really thinking about war between West Pakistan and India. When we hear of border villages in East Pakistan being seized by the Indians, we're sorry. But what we really worry about is Lahore and our own special Pakistan.”

In fact, an unofficial diplomatic evacuation of Lahore, which lies only 18 miles from the Indian border, began this week.

Any new arrivals in Islamabad are popular at the constant cocktail parties and dinners, since they bring news from the outer and presumably more dangerous world.

War spirit In Pakistan is sufficiently institutionalized at this point that the “Crush India” posters and stickers on buildings and vehicles have begun to carry commercial advertising as well as the basic message.

But apart from the ubiquitous stickers, which also often say “Oust Russians,” there are few indications in the nation's capital that Pakistan could be on the brink of a disastrous general war.

There is no sight of barbed wire, columns of troops, anti aircraft guns or the other appurtenances of war. Children pedaling their bicycles along tree‐shaded roads are more suggestive of a wealthy sub urban community in the Uni ted States than of the capital of the sixth most populous nation on earth and one of the poorest.

Since Pakistan has diplomatic relations with nearly 70 nations, diplomatic social life here is unusually cosmopolitan. Theoretically, even North and South Korean officials can meet and talk in Islamabad.

Even India, with which Pakistan is more or less at war, maintains her High Commission (embassy) here and Indian and Pakistani officials trade an occasional joke along with the barbs.

Some of the most spectacular beauty of Pakistan's mountainous northern frontier areas is within a few hours’ drive, and diplomats and their families often travel eight miles for dinner in Rawalpindi, the city of which Islamabad is more or less a suburb. Islamabad and Rawalpindi are linked by a fleet of double‐decker buses, imported, like many of Pakistan's customs, from Britain.

Even so, most people living here feel cut off from Pakistan as a whole.

“One of the most disturbing things about this Pakistan‐India mess,” one senior Western diplomat said, “is the nearly total lack of intelligence we diplomats have much of the time.”

“We are nowhere near the action and we're as much at the mercy of official communiques as anyone else. None of us really knows which end is up, and any time some country or another does something spectacular like recalling its ambassador far consultations, the rest of us tend to panic like chickens with their heads off.”

“Yes,” another diplomat agreed, “but where else in Pakistan could we be reasonably sure our children would be able to finish the school year without having to be evacuated?”