Wall Street Journal

CALCUTTA.-Consider this scenario for an American intervention.

Our ally: the 75 million Bengalis of East Pakistan who, with considerable justification, consider themselves victims of two decades of political and economic exploitation by the Punjabis of West Pakistan. Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his moderate, generally pro-Western Awami League recently won national elections in Pakistan. The Bengalis were then savagely attacked by the Punjabi controlled Pakistan army. Many Bengalis are now determined to fight for an independent Bengal nation (Bangla Desh) but they lack the military know-how and means with which to fight.

Our enemy: the 70,000 or so West Pakistani troops seeking to suppress the Bengali freedom movement and reoccupy East Pakistan. They are fighting for an autocratic military regime that has close relations with China. They have virtually no support among the Bengalis they seek to rule. They are flight-pendent solely on sea and air supply routes, without the economic resources required for a long and costly war.

An interventionist's dream. First some strong words from Washington, then a few destroyers assigned to cruise the East Pakistan coast. Some dramatic overflights by American jets. If necessary, a naval blockade to cut off Pakistan army supplies. Perhaps some air-dropped American carbines for the Bengalis. Only as a last resort some air strikes on Pakistan army bases in East Pakistan. After that, it's only a matter of passing out miracle rice seed to the happy liberated peasants of Bangla Desh - that new pro-Western bastion astride the strategic crossroads where East and Central Asia meet. If only Vietnam had been East Pakistan.

A NATURAL VICTIM

As it happened, of course, Bangla Desh did not even rate weak words of support or sympathy from Washington. Presumably the last thing America needs these days is another war, even a winnable one in a worthy cause. And even if Uncle Sam still considered himself the world's policeman, it's doubtful that he would arrest West Pakistan for assault and battery against the Bengalis, East Pakistan is simply one of those parts of the world that fails to provoke foreign passions. Overpopulated and impoverished, it encroaches on the world's consciousness only when stricken by a calamity of Biblical proportions, like last fall's fearful flood that claimed up to half a million lives. An East Pakistan earthquake that killed only 10,000 would probably rate less attention than a three-car collision on the Jersey Turnpike, East Pakistan is one of the world's natural victims.

All this is only to say the obvious: that American foreign policy doesn't follow moral imperatives. Neither does any other nation's. When the cause of Bangla Desh finally forced its way to the attention of the world's great powers they all reacted with what's called cynicism among men but passes for pragmatism among nations,

The politics of the Indian subcontinent were complicated enough before the cause of Bangla Desh came along. India and Pakistan have been enemies since they were carved out of the subcontinent's communal conflicts in 1947. Russia has edged close to India in recent years. China, for national rather than ideological reasons, is tied to Pakistan. Russia and China, of course, are at odds. America, worried over Soviet influence in India and Chinese influence in Pakistan, has tried to remain friendly with both.

What, then, are the politics of pragmatism of those nations involved with the Bangla Desh cause and of those that have sought to stay uninvolved?

For Pakistan there were several choices: To let democracy have its way, which would have meant a united Pakistan led, for the first time, by the Bengali majority rather than the Punjabi minority. To grant East Pakistan independence and seek good relations with the new sister state of Bangla Desh. To forcibly resubjugate East Pakistan. Pakistan opted for the third solution. Its army moved rapidly and ruthlessly, with tactics that included not only wanton slaughter but also systematic slaying of the Bengali middle class: politicians, professional men, students and civil servants. These are precisely the people needed to keep an administration and an economy functioning, in a conquered territory or a new nation.

In the short run the Pakistan army may well be able to maintain control of East Pakistan-now a hostile, occupied territory. But how to patch up the East Pakistan economy? How to support the cost of the occupation army? How, in the long run, to avoid being bled by a guerrilla war?

Perhaps even the Pakistanis are doubtful about their long-term prospects. But if they suspect that they will have to pull out of East Pakistan some year soon, why should they worry about killing off moderate Bengali leadership, about the Bangla Desh movement thus falling into militant leftist hands Pakistan could then at least leave a chaotic, Communist-veering Bangla Desh ss a permanent plague on neighboring India. or so the Indians fear.

A SYMPATHETIC INDIA

For many reasons, India has been openly sympathetic with the Bangla Desh cause. Pakistan 18 an enemy, and half an enemy is better than a whole one. An independent Bengal nation, under moderate leadership, might even be friendly to India. As a democracy, India is subject to public pressures, and articulate segments of that public, particularly in West Bengal, have demanded intervention. The sooner India provides support-arms training, border sanctuaries for a Bangla Desh liberation army, the more likely it is that the Bangla Desh movement will remain under moderate leadership.

Some such aid is already being given. And if a more active Indian role risks war with Pakistan, it would suit some aggressive Indian army commanders just fine, Yet India failed to extend diplomatic recognition to Bangla Desh and has moved only slowly and cautiously in giving military assistance, Why? Bangla Desh would have had to have been recognized very quickly, because once the Pakistan army began moving the liberation army collapsed. Only a month after the civil war begun, on March 25, the provisional government of Bangla Desh could venture no further into East Pakistan than a mango grove 300 meters from the Indian border, Indian policy makers, whatever their virtues, are not noted for quick decisionmaking. By late April India would have been recognizing what amounted to a government in exile. And no other countries would have followed suit.

The poor performance of the Bangla Desh leaders and their makeshift liberation movement was a disappointment even to strong Indian sympathizers. Some of them realized that channeling aid to this movement would be far from simple. Giving guns would not be enough. Training and organization are needed. And the Indian army is no great repository of wisdom on the waging of guerrilla wars.

What even of the simple problems, like insuring that guns given to the liberation army don't end up in Communist hands?

Then too, the risk of a full-scale war with Pakistan, which large-scale Indian military assistance might entail, is not to be taken lightly. India probably would win such a war, but it would divert Indian resources from the monumental domestic problems ,that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was just re-elected to try to solve. And then there's China, which might support Pakistan with more than words. India's mountain passes along the Chinese border may be much better defended now than at the time of the 1962 Sino-Indian border war, but few sane Indians seek a rematch. ( Nor, probably, does domestic oriented China.)

Finally, some Indians are concerned that a new ethnic state of Bangla Desh would provide a potent impetus for independence movements among the many ethnic groups in the patchwork Indian nation.

Red China, the proponent and patron of liberation wars chose to side verbally with West Pakistan's decidedly unrevolutionary military regime in its suppression of a popular revolution. An outrageous reversal of revolutionary doctrine, or is it? To Chairman Mao, liberation wars are not won by the likes of Sheikh Mujibur and the bourgeois bureaucrats of his Awami League who have led the Bangla Desh movement to date. Why not let the Pakistan army kill off these bourgeois nationalists, the sooner to see them replaced by leftist militants and a "people's war" that follows the gospel of Chairman Mao? That may be a long time coming, for East Pakistan's Communists are still a small force and Peking's policy is to let even approved revolutionaries help themselves. But China is nothing if not patient.

In the meantime China has cemented its friendship with West Pakistan, a valuable national ally as a counterbalance to India (with its Soviet ties) and as a solid link in Peking's chain of contacts with the rest or the noncommunist underdeveloped world. China has given Pakistan large amounts of economic and military assistance over the years, including a $200 million loan late last year, and Peking, like other nations, does not lightly write off such investments.

So China, in the short run, has backed an old friend and picked a winner in the process. And China's longer run options are still open. By the time China is ready to commit itself to a Communist insurgency in, East Pakistan the West Pakistanis may already have decided to abandon the area.

The Soviets were openly critical of West Pakistan's actions in East Pakistan and called for an end to the bloodshed. But the reasons probably have much more to do with Soviet friendship with India and hostility to China than with any sense of brotherhood with the Bengalis. And Soviet sympathies have not been so strongly expressed as to ruin relations with West Pakistan.

WHILE FROM THE U.S.

From the United States, silence. And in a situation like this, silence naturally supports the status quo - which is not a Bengal nation. There are probably several reasons: the simple wish to avoid any new foreign entanglements, a fear of reducing U.S, influence in West Pakistan and thus increasing that of the Chinese, a tendency to stick with a country in which the U.S., too, has invested much military and economic aid. Perhaps there's also another, somewhat subliminal, reason. The West Pakistanis, in addition to being a known quantity, are a rather compatible one for U.S. policy makers. Military men with handlebar mustaches and Sandhurst accents run a superficially efficient regime with clear lines of authority. It is a nation that can use American dollars to build impressive dams, train its soldiers to use American weapons and teach its farmers to grow miracle wheat. It's not a mysterious corner of Asia teeming with little black people. When American VIPs go to Pakistan, it's to see parades in Islamabad (In the West), not to see poverty in Dacca (In the East). Lyndon Johnson invited a West Pakistan camel driver to the White House, not a Bengali rickshaw puller.

It's several years too soon to say whether or not America, China, Russia, India or Pakistan made the right moves in the spring of 1971. But It's at least a reasonable bet that some kind of new nation will evolve in the years to come. When that happens, ambassadors from Washington, Peking, Moscow and Delhi will be standing at attention in Dacca for the singing of the Bangla Desh national anthem, "My Golden Bangla Desh, I Love You." And some ambassadors, of course, will be in better favor than others.