An unconscionable element of hypocrisy smirks beneath the international community's flare of concern over the possible outbreak of war between India and Pakistan. It is not just that war has been possible for months, and will remain possible so long as Pakistan balks the return of normal conditions in its eastern wing. It is that the international community, as represented at the United Nations, has resolutely refused to do what is manifestly required. Forty-seven speakers in the general debate called for political reconciliation in Pakistan but none took the implementing step—inscribing the issue on the agenda of the General Assembly or Security Council—that might have led to action. By action, we mean tough pressure on Pakistan.
Since the autonomy-turned-secessionist movement in East Pakistan was suppressed last March, the East has suffered ravages on a scale certainly no less than an outright cross-border war with India might be expected to bring. India, the victim of the Pakistani military regime's excesses against its own people, has incurred the burden of 10 million or more refugees—who keep coming—at a cost running perhaps $1 billion more than its receipts in international relief. Yet this colossal and continuing misfortune has found the United Nations content to chatter, and to arrange some helpful but grossly inadequate relief. Will it take the jolt of a few artillery rounds fired from Pakistan into India, or the other way around, to rouse the U.N. to effective alarm?
The American position remains disgraceful. The other day the State Department mustered a feeble call for restraint on both sides. It was an appeal rendered grotesque by the twin facts that one side, Pakistan, is almost entirely responsible for the threat to the peace, and the United States is a partisan—arms, supplies, political support, relief and so on—of that side. In fact, the danger to peace on the subcontinent does not lie in the traditional differences between India and Pakistan but in Pakistan's policy of exporting an internal political problem—in the form of refugees—into India. American leadership in the provision of relief is simply not enough. It must be accompanied by stern political efforts to induce Pakistan to halt the persecution of its own people.
We suggested last July that the matter was urgent enough to justify efforts to arrange an immediate joint appeal to Pakistan by Washington, Moscow and Peking. We continue to believe that this proposal, if it could be implemented, would be effective. What is the purpose of improving relations with old adversaries if it is not to try out new forms of political collaboration with them? So far as we know, our suggestion has gotten nowhere since July. But, incredibly, the subcontinent's suffering has intensified and now a renewed threat of open war has been added to it.