UNITED NATIONS, N.Y.-India has won the battle for East
Pakistan, but in the larger perspectives of world
politics, this is not the main thing. For the Soviet
Union has emerged from this avoidable and tragic
conflict as the military arsenal and political defender
of India, with access for Moscow's rising naval power to
the Indian Ocean, and a base of political and military
operations on China's southern flank.

This was the big background question In the Indo-
Pakistani war. It was not only a local war between India
and Pakistan, not only another phase in the long
religious conflict between the Muslims and the Hindus,
not only a moral conflict between Pakistan's vicious
suppression of the Bangladesh rebels and India's
calculated military aggression to dismember the
Pakistani state. Back of all this, there was a power
struggle between China and the Soviet Union, and a
strategic struggle between Moscow and Washington, and at
this point in the story, which is not the last chapter,
Moscow has probably gained more than anybody else.

Everybody has been so preoccupied with the struggles,
blunders and tragedies of the Indians and Pakistanis,
who cannot even share their common misery, that they
have forgotten these larger world strategic struggles
between Washington and Moscow. But the leaders in Moscow
have obviously not forgotten the larger question, or
allowed their arguments in the Middle East or their
efforts to reach a strategic arms agreement with the
United States to get in the way of their nationalistic
interests in the Indian subcontinent.

In the strategic arms talks with the United States in
Vienna and Helsinki, and in the Middle East debates
between Israel and the Arab states, the Soviet diplomats
have been arguing for compromise and accommodation.
Their propaganda is plain: The great powers must work
together for peace, military power must not be used to
achieve political objectives, and when it is-as in the
case of Israel in the war with the Arab states-the
territory captured by military aggression must be given
up.

But when the United States invoked these principles in
an effort to force the Indians and the Pakistanis to
stop the fighting and withdraw within their own borders,
the Soviet Union switched. It was not interested in
compromise or accommodation with the United States and
the other permanent members Of the U.N. Security
Council. It went against the will of the overwhelming
majority of both the Security Council and the General
Assembly, and cast its veto against a cease-fire and
withdrawal.

In short, Moscow reverted to Russia's historic
ambitions. It saw a chance to weaken Washington's long
association with India and India's democratic experiment
in Asia to create a new alliance with India and weak en
China, to dismember Pakistan, and to do so at a time
when the passes between China and India were choked with
snow and Peking could not easily counterattack in the
North.

Well, maybe all these cunning tactics will work, and
India will be able to encourage independence for one
faction in Pakistan without encouraging independence for
other factions in India itself, including the powerful
Communist faction in the Indian state of Kerala, but the
success of India and the Soviet Union in this squalid
tragedy is not the end of the story.

They could, by their momentary triumph, have created the
things they fear the most. Moscow has certainly
encouraged by this calculated power play a closer
relationship between Washington and Peking just before
President Nixon's visit to China.

Also, India, which won with Soviet military arms and
Soviet diplomatic vetoes In the United Nations, is now
dependent on aid from the Soviet Union, rather than from
the United states, and in the long run, this could be a
more awkward alliance.

Somebody is now going to have to pick up the pieces,
finance the repatriation of the Pakistani refugees and
rebuild the Indian Army: and Moscow will probably pick
up the bill. For this was not only, and maybe not even
mainly, an Indo-Pakistani conflict, but a Soviet-Chinese
conflict, and the Soviets now have the possibility of
bases in India, south of China, in addition to their
million men on the Sino-Soviet border in the north
This is really what the Nixon Administration had in mind
when it sided with Pakistan against India. Washington
was late and dense in reacting to Pakistanis violent
repression of the Bangladesh rebels and the tragedy of
the ten million Pakistani refugees driven into India,
and it might have avoided the worst of the tragedy if it
had reacted sooner; but in the middle of the Indo-
Pakistani crisis, it finally understood the larger
strategic challenge of Moscow's power play.

Maybe this puts the confrontation of the United states
the Soviet Union and China in Asia in terms that are too
bleak and pessimistic, but the Indo-Pakistani war should
not be underestimated. It is not merely a political,
religious and geographical struggle in the subcontinent
of India but part of a much wider conflict in a rapidly
changing world.