Nation

War between India and Pakistan has emerged as the
final arbiter in the Bangla Desh liberation
struggle. The Pakistani Army is now faced on all
sides by an enemy that enjoys local superiority in
manpower and weapons.

Well-prepared defensive positions along the border
and heavily fortified fall-back positions in the
main cantonment towns enabled the Pakistani Army
to inflict losses on the attacker before it was
overwhelmed. But these bastions have crumbled with
remarkable speed. It is here that the presence of
the Bangla Desh liberation army-the Mukti
Bahini-has made defeat inevitable for
Pakistan. The spread of the insurgency rendered
the entire hinterland of the Pakistani Army
insecure and their garrisons became beleaguered
islands which could survive only as long as their
immediate supplies held out. A totally hostile
local population made retreat as great a hazard to
the West Pakistanis as facing the Indians. Now, as
the army of Yahya Khan withdraws, vast areas of
Bangla Desh are coming under the direct control of
the Mukti Bahini, and in many of these a Bangla
Desh administration has begun to function.

However, the war is likely to draw attention from
the fact that Pakistan's military position within
Bangla Desh had already begun to erode as the
Mukti Bahini grew stronger and more pervasive. By
the end of August a full division of the Pakistani
Army had been decimated by the freedom fighters
and had to be replaced. In the last two months
another division was knocked out and in late
November the Pakistanis had to fly in another
division.

The latest full-scale offensive by three divisions
of the Mukti Bahini demonstrated to the Pakistanis
the unlimited potential of the Bengali
resistance. Armor, aircraft and artillery had to
be thrown into the effort to contain this
offensive. In areas where the Pakistanis,
exercising their right of hot pursuit, pressed the
Mukti Bahini into India, they collided with Indian
forces, equally belligerent and determined to
exercise their own right of hot pursuit. This
must have convinced the Pakistanis that, while the
invulnerable Mukti Bahini could grow stronger in
the days ahead, their own forces were faced with
an impossible military situation. They had either
to accept the reality of an independent Bangla
Desh or stake all in a last desperate gamble of
war with India. I had predicted this latter course
back in August, writing in the New Statesman:

Yahya may paradoxically prefer Bangla
Desh breaking away within the context of an
Indo-Pakistan war rather than by its own
efforts. This is likely to be more tolerable to
him and his generals, who may fear for the unity
of what will be left of a Pakistan consumed by
regional and social tensions after 75 million
Bengalis opt out of the union.

The Pakistanis had prepared for this by raising
the cry of Indian "aggression" from the moment
that the Mukti Bahini launched its winter
offensive. They had hoped to internationalize the
war, but needed more than border skirmishes to get
the Security Council involved. They may have
thought to secure a chunk of Kashmir as recompense
for Bangla Desh, but this objective was highly
problematical, given India's belligerent mood. The
final phase was begun by air attacks on the Indian
airport of Agartala in the East and on eight
airfields in the West. By this act, which was
bound to provoke India to war, the West Pakistanis
have conceded that Bangla Desh is lost and that it
would be better to hand it over to the Indian Army
than surrender it to the Mukti Bahini.

But who are the Mukti Bahini? How have they made
such a dramatic impression in this very short
period of time and what were their tactics? What
is the extent of their support and of their
success? These questions deserve the attention of
a world that has tended to see the issue of Bangla
Desh primarily as an Indo-Pakistani confrontation.
These young men were strong enough to launch the
full-scale offensive against the Pakistani Army
which triggered the present war. They have the
power to thwart any international action which
chooses to bypass the determination of 75 million
Bengalis to rule themselves.

What is remarkable about the emergence of the
Bangla Desh fighting force is that there was
nothing in the contemporary history or culture of
the region to indicate a rapacity for armed
struggle. Few of the young men of the Mukti Bahini
had ever handled a gun before the 25th of
March. In Algeria, as in many parts of the Middle
East or even West Pakistan, guns and armed warfare
are part of the national tradition. In Vietnam, a
whole generation has grown up with the sound of
gunfire as part of its normal experience.

By contrast, the young men of Bangla Desh were
more skilled in rhetoric than in warfare. While
there had been me violence in street riots, it
rarely escalated beyond ones against police
batons. Tear gas and occasional police ring raised
the scale of conflict, but there was no attempt
respond by taking to firearms.

None of the political groups in Bangla Desh had
the sort of apparatus needed to sustain a
guerrilla struggle. The Awami League, easily the
largest and most pervasive of the parties, was
geared to the forms of democratic politics; at
best, it was equipped to organize civil
disobedience, but quite unprepared to face the
Pakistani Army. The parties of the orthodox Left
were no better off. Their sources of strength
were urban students and intellectuals, a few trade
unions and some peasant areas. But these cadres
ere good primarily for agitational politics and
most of them were forced to flee from their areas
of influence once the army struck.

Some small groups drawn from factions of the
Maoist wing of the National Awami Party (NAP)
managed hold their ground because their base was
very small and their operations very
restricted. Theoretically, they were perhaps
better equipped and more skilled at submerging
hemselves in their rural bases. But they too were
quite untrained in the methods of guerrilla
struggle, and some at least were confused by
Peking's apparent declaration of support for
Yahya.

As a result, in the initial phase of the army
counterattack, the cadres were either put to
flight or compelled lo lie low. Then the army's
indiscriminate use of terror led to widespread
destruction of life and property and began the
exodus of refugees which has today reached 10
million.

However, the army's "kill and burn" forays, which
were at first aimed indiscriminately at Hindus,
were supplemented by a more selective attack on
the Awami League and the cadres and supporters of
the groups on the Left. This presupposed some
understanding of Bengali society. The West
Pakistanis were obliged to recruit political
parties and social groups which could act as their
eyes and ears in the furtherance of selective
terror and eventually assume responsibility for
the task.

The army organized local "peace committees," drawn
from the right-wing parties such as Jamaat-e-Islam
and from various Muslim League parties that had
been trounced in the December 1970 elections. In
the rural areas they sought out village headmen,
affluent farmers and local politicians who had
made up the Ayub-created Basic Democrats. These in
turn used their more able-bodied and younger
followers, reinforced by local hoodlum elements
and some elements of the proletariat lured by the
offer of free food and a pittance a day, to make
up the Razakars, or fighting gangs.

The idea was to use the Islamic parties and rivals
of the Awami League that had been eclipsed by the
elections. Where ideology was an inadequate
incentive, the offer of Hindu land, possessions,
cash and women proved more enticing. The rich
farmers, feeling threatened by the forces let
loose by the elections, saw this as a last
opportunity to preserve the order of privilege
which had reached its climax under Ayub's Basic
Democracies system. In the towns, Bengali
capitalists and elements of the middle class,
fearing for their privileges and wealth, looked to
the army for support.

These groups were used to spy out Awami League and
NAP workers, as well as Hindus, who were then
liquidated by the army. As a result, in the
May-June period the political base for guerrilla
actions had been almost eliminated. Indeed,
widespread use of terror made otherwise
sympathetic villagers hesitant to shelter
political workers on the run or the occasional
commando group. The Pakistani Army proved that, if
you have no compunctions about whom you kill and
how much destruction you visit on a people, a
level of terror may be attained that paralyzes
action. The Nazis adopted such tactics in
occupied Europe, where they used collective
punishment to deter sabotage and shot hostages
every time a German soldier was killed by
partisans. They could do so because they were
dealing with alien and subject peoples, for whom
they felt no sympathy, and whose political
allegiance they did not seek. The Pakistani Army
similarly functioned as an army of occupation and
showed by its behavior that it was not restrained
by any sense of common nationality with the
Bengalis. Indeed they shared the conviction of
their Bengali victims that Pakistan had died on
March 25, for in our day no army or government
would dare to inflict such damage on a people with
whom it expected to share a common future.

The purpose of these tactics was not just to
intimidate the local population but to inhibit
guerrilla action. If you know that two villages
will be razed and 100 people shot if you blow up a
bridge, you will probably think twice before
setting the fuse. It is a testimony to the courage
and political awareness of the villagers that,
after their initial fear, they were willing to
risk reprisals by providing cover for the
guerrillas. There are many reasons for this change
of heart, but probably the major one was the
hatred and desperation engendered by the genocidal
abominations of the army.

In this situation, any immediate and dramatic
resort to large-scale guerrilla warfare was
improbable. Rather than wait for better
conditions, the sector commanders of the Mukti
Bahini broke up their formations and concentrated
on commando operations. This meant that, rather
than seek direct confrontation with the Pakistani
Army, as they had in the first weeks, they sent
out small units on limited actions. These groups
ambushed army convoys and raided isolated posts,
with the objectives of capturing weapons and
keeping the enemy in a state of perpetual tension.

Apart from direct attacks, the main aim was to
disrupt the communications that were crucial to
the survival of the Pakistani Army in an alien
land. In riverine Bengal, bridges became an
inevitable target, as did embanked roads and
railway lines. Sufficient success was achieved to
force the army to move increasingly on the river
routes. The monsoons were something of an
advantage to the invaders, since they could use
many channels that are not navigable in the dry
season. The Pakistani appeal to the world for
shallow draft landing craft-to be used ostensibly
for distributing food-was part of the logistical
plan for the dry season that has now arrived.

The Mukti Bahini were also alive to the importance
of denying economic resources to the invader. It
undertook to bring all exports to a standstill so
that foreign exchange would not be available to
the West Pakistani economy. West Pakistan normally
consumed 80 per cent of Bangla Desh's export
earnings and, under the new conditions, could be
expected to take it all. The main targets were
jute and jute goods and tea. Jute warehouses were
attacked and shipments from the producing areas to
the marketing centers were intercepted. This was
successful to the point that not more than one of
three shiploads was getting through, and export
earnings from jute products in the coming season
were not expected to exceed 25 per cent of the
norm.

In industrial areas the aim was to preserve
capital equipment, but to slow production by
persuading workers to stay away. Power stations
and electric grids were attacked. It was hard to
maintain a work boycott over any length of time
because, however dedicated to the cause,
desperately poor workers could not be expected to
subject their families to starvation. It was thus
a measure of the politicization of the working
class than in industrial areas, even after eight
months, many mills could muster barely 50 per cent
of their workers, and quite a few not even that.
The work force was augmented in some areas with
non-Bengali labor, but that was offset by the
army's persistent use of terror against workers,
which drove them back to the villages.

Once frogmen had been trained in the use of limpet
mines, attacks on shipping were stepped up. Three
of twelve oil tankers of the local oil companies
were put out of commission. The more recent use of
gunboats by the Mukti Bahini was the final blow,
and four foreign shipping companies had instructed
their vessels to bypass Bangla Desh ports before
India entered the war. United States and British
insurance companies had doubled their premiums for
war risk and civil commotion, thereby adding to
export costs and reducing net receipts of foreign
exchange.

Even though some exports of jute, mainly from
stocks, were sent out, these were one-shot
ventures. For the first time in Pakistan's
quarter-century history Bangla Desh had become an
economic liability to West Pakistan. The mounting
economic crisis in the West has already raised the
cost of the war to danger levels and this must be
reckoned as an achievement of the resistance
comparable to the withholding of fresh aid
commitments by donor countries.

In the initial phase of resistance the Mukti
Bahini could rely on professionals. It was
evident, however, that their numbers would have
to be substantially increased if they were to
become a serious threat to the Pakistani
Army. The unending flow of young men
volunteering to fight for the liberation of
their motherland indicated that manpower would
be no problem. The problem was to train and
equip them.

A two-tier training system was introduced. Youth
camps were set up to attract all young men, and
these soon had some 250,000 volunteers eager for
action. But limitations of weaponry and
training personnel made it impossible to employ
them all. In the camps they were kept fit and
given some rudimentary training. They were also
screened, and the best material was selected for
the more rigorous training required by the
regular Bangla Desh army.

Rather than leave the vast majority of
volunteers idle in the camps, a second training
scheme was started to build up a guerrilla
force. These boys were subjected to a less
intensive and shorter, training schedule, but
were schooled in the use of light automatic
weapons, mortars and explosives. It was planned
to put 100,000 of these youths in the field by
the end of November, with another 100,000 to
follow. They were infiltrated into villages and
towns where they were to merge with the local
population. They were equipped with sten guns,
rifles, some 2inch mortars and explosives.

Because Bangla Desh lacks jungle or mountains
for concealment or retreat, the support of the
local population was essential. As far as
possible, young men were sent to their home
areas. They lived with the local people who fed
them and provided warning and intelligence. To
get villagers to this point of cooperation
required some preparatory assaults on the peace
committees and their fighting gangs. Commando
raids were stepped up. Late in October, Khawja
Khairuddin, a local right-wing leader, confessed
to John Woodroffe of the Baltimore Sun that some
20,000 collaborators and their families had
"sacrificed" their lives defending the
"integrity" of Pakistan. This heavy toll
succeeded in many areas in cleansing the pond
where the guerrillas-the fish-had to swim. As a
result there are many parts of Bangla Desh where
guerrillas moved freely and publicly.

This ascendancy was not attained in most of the
urban areas, and as a result guerrilla actions
there were more sporadic and their presence more
clandestine. Here again a rudimentary
infrastructure had to be constructed to serve
the guerrillas. Shelter and transport had to be
found for them, and funds to finance their
operations. Most urban Bengali middle-class
households were approached for funds for the
resistance and most of these-including some
senior civil servants, office workers,
businessmen-paid to finance the
guerrillas. Local fund raising was regularly
supplemented by daring bank robberies staged by
the guerrillas themselves.

From this rather rudimentary cover the urban
guerrillas mounted quick ambushes on the army
and their collaborators. Assassination, sabotage
and bombings created a sense of total insecurity
in the towns. Results varied, but all reports in
the past several weeks indicate a dramatic
escalation of urban violence, even in the
capital city of Dacca. In a desperate attempt to
break the guerrilla network, the army was forced
to impose a twenty-four-hour curfew and initiate
a house-to-house search. But they netted only
138 "suspects" and Dacca remained as insecure as
ever.

The army continued to burn villages and stage
mass executions, but the increase of guerrilla
actions and their more pervasive presence had
fortified public morale, so that terror was
becoming counterproductive. A sense of national
consciousness, reinforced by the hatred aroused
by army brutality, made it possible to identify
the enemy and define the goals of the
struggle. Independence for Bangla Desh was a
straightforward objective to which 98 per cent
of the population could unambiguously commit
themselves. Some of the right-wing parties and
some of the older generation in the urban areas
who had sentimental memories of the Pakistani
movement may have had reservations. But the
guerrillas could bank on the support of the
overwhelming majority of the population.

As people saw that the Pakistani Army was
bleeding, that their own sons were there beside
them to fight the army, the ordinary citizen was
being turned into a positive weapon. Political
cadres had to work closely with the guerrillas,
so that the people were educated in the politics
as well as the techniques of this new phase of
struggle. A large proportion of the guerrillas
were themselves students and hence politically
conscious and articulate. The problems remained
formidable, since guns and violence had to be
recognized as a new reality in villages that had
been relatively peaceful for centuries.

The political goal of independence was simple
and comprehensible enough, but obviously the
political message need not stop there. The
political beliefs of different guerrilla groups
and the objective situation in an area played
some role. Where, for instance, peace committees
had been led by local village headmen and
supported by the affluent, popular feeling was
channeled into class as much as nationalist
lines. This generated a popular impulse for
redistributive measures, but often no positive
social program emerged to fill the vacuum
created by the elimination of the local elite
groups.

The vacuum in ideas was as evident among
orthodox Left groups in the few areas where they
operated as it was in the more pervasive,
radical Awami League cadres. Objective
circumstances have brought their respective
positions much closer as the national and class
struggles have coalesced. But they have both
suffered from lack of any clear design of the
new order or trained cadres to refashion village
society, as the Red Army did in the liberated
zones during the civil war against Chiang.

In the most recent phase of the struggle,
guerrilla action inside was meshed with assaults
by regular units of the Mukti Bahini on the
Pakistani Army. Tension with India had tied down
the five divisions of the Pakistani Army on the
perimeters of Bangla Desh. They were dug into
defensive position fashioned to meet a
conventional attack from across the
border. Their own strategy demonstrated a lack
of confidence in the outcome of such a
confrontation. They believed that they would
lose the use of the airfields, which were
vulnerable to air attack, and that internal
communications would be rendered insecure by the
guerrillas. They therefore had to move their
supplies to the border where they expected to
fight a defensive war as long as their supplies
held out-which was reckoned to be about three
weeks. There was no longer any hope for
reinforcement from the West, since the forces
there faced their own confrontation with
India. As a result the Pakistani Army within
Bangla Desh was put on its own and found it
increasingly difficult to deploy itself against
the guerrillas as long as the state of tension
with India continued. This was fortunate for the
guerrillas, for it coincided with their own
offensive inside Bangla Desh. Here they now had
to confront an enemy weak in skills and low in
morale. Imported West Pakistani Rangers-a
paramilitary force-were blind and helpless in a
foreign land and became easy targets. Similarly,
the largely non-Bengali Civil Defense Force had
been built from scratch and was low in skills
and experience. The more numerous Razakars
(fighting gangs), predominant in the rural
areas, were by now proving a mixed
blessing. Apart from a hard core of zealots,
most of their members had joined up for personal
gain. As the tide turned, they were transferring
their allegiance. This had compelled the army to
keep them lightly armed; it hardly wanted AK-47s
to find their way into the hands of the
guerrillas.

Faced with a progressively deteriorating
situation, it is less than surprising that
Pakistan has chosen the desperate course of
full-scale war with India, which promises to put
an end to twenty-four years of colonial
domination by West Pakistan over the more
numerous people of Bangla Desh. The Pakistani
Army has converted the peaceable Bengalis into a
warrior people whose commitment to nationhood
has been hardened by the experiences of the
resistance. It remains to be seen if this same
West Pakistani junta whose blunders transformed
a parliamentary movement for democracy into the
Bangla Desh liberation struggle can survive its
loss of East Pakistan and hold West Pakistan's
diverse nationalities together by continuing to
invoke the self-serving rallying cry of Indian
domination.