Life

"Unofficially we are at war,"; declared General A.A.K.
Niazi, West Pakistan's spit-and-polish senior military officer
in East Pakistan. But with just whom was a matter of debate. In
fact, the enemy appeared to consist of virtually the whole
population of East Pakistan, plus contingents of the Indian
army which crossed the border two weeks ago and stayed there.
With India's in-tervention, the already tragic East Pakistan
situation slid yet nearer to another futile and exhausting Asian
war, this time be-tween two of the poorest nations on earth.

East and West Pakistan have Mohammedanism in common,
but little else. The two parts of the country are a thousand miles
apart, and the rough Punjabis and Pathans of the West, who
run the government and fill the ranks of the army, feel contempt
for the slender, dark-skinned Bengalis of the East. The crisis
began months ago when the Pakistani army crushed a powerful
independence movement in East Pakistan, arrested its leader and
instituted a military reign of terror. Hordes of Bengali
refugees flooded into India-nine. million of them, according to
New Delhi. It was this intolerable burden that brought the Indian
army in-along with, perhaps, a chance to sneak a blow at
their old enemy while it was having trouble. The Indians at first
denied having attacked, until casualties (left) and captives
proved otherwise. Then they said they were merely raiding the
border to silence Pakistani batteries that were shelling Indian
villages. Ominously, India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi termed
the mere presence of West Pakistani troops anywhere in East
Pakistan "a threat to our security".

So far the half-war is being fought with quaint Sandhurstian
echoes of team spirit and stiff upper lip, and with old-fash-
ioned weapons and tactics ill suited to East Pakistan's watery
terrain. A greater threat than the Indians (although Pakistan
professes to despise it) lies deep within Pakistani lines. There,
thousands of Mukti Bahini, Indian-trained Bengali "freedom
fighters," are slowly preparing a guerrilla war of the kind that
military minds like General Niazi's, despite the object lesson
of Vietnam, seem unable to cope with or even comprehend.