General Yahya Khan, President of Pakistan and Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army, is a good man and an intelligent soldier. It was a simple sense of duty (and catastrophic intelligence misinformation) which persuaded him three weeks ago to order his troops to restore law and order in East Pakistan. Because he is a decent, orthodox army man, who acted according to orthodox army logic, General Yahya thinks he has succeeded, and can now continue as leader of a united nation. He is still unaware that his attempted coup was the worse military crime of recent years; and probably the biggest political blunder.

Islamabad, the West Pakistan capital, is full of noble-looking soldiers like General Yahya. They stride around the orderly streets with a fine, proud bearing; they play polo as if nothing had happened to disturb their sport. It is strange to arrive here to see them, so remote from the piles of dead in East Pakistan. The officers’ wives complain that the emergency has caused the cancellation of the Islamabad gardens competition - just when the spring borders were looking their neatest. In such crisp, disciplined surroundings it gradually becomes possible to understand how - to the military mind - killing faraway people, even if they your own countrymen, becomes a matter of removing some unfortunate untidiness.

Apart from the soldiers, Islamabad is populated by ordinary West Pakistani citizens who read daily in their censored newspapers about happiness, tranquillity and joy in the East (and therefore agree the law and order operation was a great success), and the foreign community who read other newspapers (and therefore disagree). Among Islamabad people who knew there was a civil war on - diplomats, for instance - I found surprising unanimity. They believe that Pakistan, as a nation built of two halves separated by geography but united by religion, is finished. East Pakistan is doomed to many years of starvation, chaos, and bloodshed. West Pakistan is doomed to an economic crisis of considerable seriousness. The two must inevitably break apart.

“Sheer, bloody stupidity,” was the undiplomatic phrase one diplomat was driven to use. Even General Yahya’s best friends in the diplomatic corps, men who strive to explain, if not to justify, what made the General act as he did, are beginning to use words like “dementia” to describe his unwillingness to recognize the error of what he has done, and what its consequences must be.

Of course, Yahya is not the only villain in this terrible story. The vacillating, neurotic personality of the East Pakistani leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, can also be partly blamed. During the crucial negotiations Sheikh Mujib seemed almost to prefer the idea of prison to the awesome responsibilities of being Prime Minister of Pakistan. Nothing else explains the tame manner in which he awaited arrest in Dacca on March 25. At all events, he achieved his wish. People in Islamabad who know about such things say Sheikh Mujib is now ticked away in a comfortable cell at the Attock Fort, 50 miles from Islamabad. A real heavy is Mr. Zulfikar Bhutto, West Pakistan’s political leader. There is evidence that Mr. Bhutto deliberately sabotaged the negotiations between General Yahya and Sheikh Mujib. He did so to protect West Pakistani interests - perhaps with the connivance of the army - but it was also obvious that he did not welcome the prospect of playing second-fiddle to Sheikh Mujib in a united Pakistan.

Also apart of this stage army of the bad are the hawkish army generals and Punjabi civil servants who surround Yahya, and are supposed by some to have pushed him into the bloody action to preserve their privilege and prosperity. Five names are canvassed for places in this cabal. There is Major-General Tikka Khan, Martial Law Administrator of East Pakistan. He directed the troops during their first night’s killing in Dacca. There is Lieutenant-General Pirzada, Principal Staff Officer to Yahya. Pirzada is a military law expert; he drafted the Martial Law Regulations by which Pakistan is ruled. He is an articulate and intelligent man, and Yahya has come to rely more and more on him to rationalise his actions before and after they happen. Some call him the de facto Prime Minister of Pakistan.

There is Major-General Umar, as Chairman of the National Security Council, the top military spymaster. Umar is a hawk among hawks, totally impatient of Bengali secessionism. There is Major-General Akbar, Chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence Committee. Umar and Akbar between them must have provided their Commander-in-Chief with the disastrous (perhaps even deliberately distorted) advice that the Bengali nationalists would quickly collapse, then tamely conform, after one violent military assault. Finally, there is Mr. Mohammed Mohammed Ahmad, the one civilian really close to General Yahya. Mr. Ahmad is Chairman of Pakistan’s Planning Commission, which runs the economy of the country. He is a Punjabi, passionately patriotic towards his region, and less so towards Bengal. If there was any justice in the charge that Pakistan’s economy has been rigged to favour the Punjab at the expense of the East, then Mr. Ahmad has played a part.

Did these men force Yahya into his military adventure? And do they still keep him prisoner of an anti-Bengali crusade? I don’t entirely think so. More likely, their role is simply to bolster the General’s bluff Punjabi impulses, and to insulate him from unwelcome criticisms by foreigners and intellectuals. Indeed it would be dangerous to say they dominate him. For General Yahya Khan, displaying the more childish aspect of his simple, extrovert nature, resents nothing more than any allegation that he is the puppet of his advisers. It was tactless questioning along these lines by British journalists at the time of the East Pakistan floods that inspired Yahya’s obsessive dislike of newspaper reporters. Brash young men had been disrespectful to a distinguished Head of State. He brooded on it and complained about it to Englishmen, high and low, on frequent occasions. When 35 journalists found themselves trapped in the Dacca Intercontinental Hotel on March 25, General Yahya combined pleasure with business and shipped them out of the country, away from the embarrassing goings on, with maximum roughness.

India, too, played her usual devious game of saying and doing everything and nothing at once. News reports on India Radio and in the Indian Press about fighting are almost as ridiculous as the reports in the Pakistani Press. As such, they are God’s gift to Islamabad, and to Bhutto’s relentless anti- Indian campaign. But India has not invaded East Pakistan, nor done any of the overwhelming things that the Pakistanis, and their allies the Chinese, allege. Every time Yahya’s propaganda chiefs are asked about the civil war, they respond with a stream of abuse about Indian infiltrators attacking loyal Pakistanis. Alas, they are never able to show actual proof that more than two Indian soldiers have crossed the border, and even these may be old ones left over from the Indo-Pak War. (The trouble, of course, is too many chiefs and not enough Indians - but that’s by the by.)

Looking back on the long, infinitely complicated, history of the negotiations between General Yahya and Mujib, the General’s friends say that - given the contrasting characters of Yahya, Mujib, and Bhutto - things tolled forward with the inexorability of a Greek tragedy. The Bengalis behaved like Bengalis at their worst, Punjabis likewise. The General’s critics take a less philosophical view. They say Yahya was an orthodox military dictator who last year began to re-introduce parliamentary democracy, but when democracy caused him trouble withdrew it, and used bullets to silence those who objected.
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The General’s friends say he would have been happy to hand over power to Sheikh Mujib, and had agreed to all the famous “Six Points” of greater Eastern independence that the Sheikh’s Awami League demanded. If he disputed, it was only to stop a complete break-away of East Pakistan, or the equally unpleasant alternative of a counter-rebellion in the West. If he stopped, it was only because he saw the Marxists and hooligans had in fact taken over from the Sheikh.

The General’s enemies say he never seriously intended to give up power, and the talks were a charade. They point out that two of the Six Points, giving East Pakistan the right to collect its own taxes and control its own exports, could ultimately have starved the army of money - and no President-General is going to put his soldiers at the mercy of Bengali tax collectors and politicians. The truth probably lies between these two extremes. What really scuppered any chance of agreement, however, was the intervention of Mr. Bhutto.

As far back as January, Yahya and Mujib had a long series of talks in Dacca to work out what they could do about the election result, which gave Mujib an overall majority. Yahya made concessions, and Mujib on his part promised that for at least two years as Prime Minister he would not tamper with the money supply to the army, or radically change other economic arrangements. Yahya was delighted, and on emerging from the conference room pointed at Sheikh Mujib and told reporters: “This is the man who will be running Pakistan.” Then he went off to shoot birds.

The resulting headlines caused panic and fury in West Pakistan. In Islamabad his advisers descended upon Yahya determinedly, pointing out he had pawned the country’s future with only a vague promise from Bengal’s most famous prevaricator as a guarantee. At this point Mr. Bhutto, with the clear power to enflame all the West if he wanted, added his private voice to the clamour. No one quite knows what he said. But two things are certain. Firstly, he did not praise Sheikh Mujib, whom he detests. Secondly, shortly afterwards General Yahya began quietly moving troop reinforcements into East Pakistan.

By this time it was mid-February. Things were growing tenser daily. Mujib had won the election, why couldn’t he now take power ? His supporters grew more and more bitter and unruly. Yahya promised the National Assembly would meet on March 5. Then Bhutto totally sabotaged even that chance of peace by declaring he, and his 80 MPs, would simply not turn up at the Assembly even if it were convened. So even though Yahya was loudly proclaiming his willingness to inaugurate a democracy, half of it would be missing on opening day. Many say Bhutto was in cahoots with the cabal, the army, and even Yahya when he made his veto. It did, after all, neatly let the General out of his promises.

Oddly enough, the last straw was a series of student riots on Pakistan National Day when Yahya, from his conference balcony, saw the violent anarchy of a typical Bengali demonstration, with Marxist hoodlums waving red flags, and trampling on pictures of Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Trampling on Jinnah! It explains much about this simple, honourable man that such desecration weighed more with him than any of the other dangers of democracy. Total chaos threatened in East Pakistan, and he must stop it. Plans for the military coup were intensified.

Three weeks ago came the big bang, and God knows how many thousands of people have been killed by the West Pakistan army, and by Bengalis taking gruesome revenge on Punjabis. It is probable that as the ammunitions for Bangladesh guerrillas begins to run out the army will gain final control of the towns. The monsoon rains, on the other hand, will help the guerrillas. Fighting will continue in some shape or form, for months if not years.

The military coup was designed to stop East Pakistan sliding into chaos, brigandage, race murder, starvation, and alliance with some as yet unchosen communist power. It will, on the contrary, bring all these things about, in a far more extreme form.

Meanwhile, things are bad in West Pakistan, and getting worse. There has been no trade between East and West since the March talks began, and no export of jute from Eastern ports since the war began. No taxes have been collected for a long time. In normal times the West exploits the East not by finagling aid money or diverting plum government jobs as Bangladesh propagandists allege, but by using it as a captive market. No one else would buy West Pakistan’s cheap cotton clothes, and other relatively shoddy goods. Without jute exports there is no foreign exchange to feed the West’s industry.

The war is using up millions of rupees daily. If the cost of holding down 17 million Vietnamese nearly ruined the American economy, what will the cost of holding down 75 million Bengalis do to the fragile Pakistan economy? The foreign loans - worth over £50 million a year - have dried up, because no one will hand over money to a country half in chaos. The loan consortium, made up of America, Britain, France, West Germany, Japan and Italy, has refused to say if it will hold its scheduled meeting, late in April. Much of the diplomatic energy in Islamabad is being extended on furious tickings-off to each ambassador in turn. Otherwise, the government machine has virtually stopped functioning, because no one knows what is happening, and half the civil servants are “unreliable” men from the East. There is a national budget due to be presented in just over two months’ time. No one has seriously started to think about it. Every day talented Bengalis in influential posts are sacked, and untalented inexperienced Punjabis take their place.

At the same time Bengalis in the armed forces are causing problems. All military pilots have been grounded, 24 army officers in East Pakistan have reportedly been court-martialled, and the navy, half manned by Bengali sailors, is unsurprisingly in a mutinous state. For these and many other reasons, it is generally agreed that West Pakistan is headed for virtual economic collapse within months. The result will be in many ways more permanently damaging than the carnage in the East, which as a near¬-subsistence economy is used to coping with disaster.

It is an unpleasant prospect and obviously something drastic must be done to stop it. The rest of the world may be held back from frank moral judgments about who is to blame by considerations of diplomatic tact, but it has financial levers to apply, and with apply them. The terrible possibility is that General Yahya Khan may ignore these sanctions, however disastrous to his country. Those who have been remonstrate with him report that he seems to believe only what he wants to believe. He really thinks the law and order operation in East Pakistan is, after some unexpected difficulties, succeeding. He really thinks that the only problem now is the dastardly Indian intervention. He believes all this, even though someone must have told him it was invented by his own propaganda machine.

There is something of the mysterious oriental Pasha in Yahya Khan, behind his Sandhurst chic. As a Moslem, he is finding something intoxicating in retreating into a ferocious isolation. The more the infidel world protests, the more epic the lonely struggle becomes. The leaders of West Pakistan may even prefer to bring down everything, glorious destruction than undergo the humiliation of admitting they were wrong.

To discover this in Islamabad, after the all-too-real carnage of East Pakistan, makes it seem even more histrionics - like a bad old film, or a wilder passage by James Elroy Flecker. The romantic band of noble warriors, crying defiance to the infidel, the foreigner and all Bengalis, plunge over the cliff on their white chargers waving their sabres so they flash in the setting sun. Such an end has a certain poetry but it is a pity that a country and 119 million people have to go over the cliff at the same time.