Minutes before the Boeing 707s of Pakistan International Airlines take off from Dacca airport for the long, long flight round India to Karachi, a military ambulance backs up to the rear door of each aircraft and stretchers are hurriedly, even furtively carried abroad. The patients are soldiers, going home to West Pakistan because the military hospitals in Dacca are full. These sad cargoes are concealed, more or less, from the people of Dacca, for no Bengalis are allowed on, or anywhere near, the airport; but once the plane is airborne non-military passengers can see the wounded soldiers and talk to the doctor escorting them.

On my flight this week there were six, two had had legs blown off by mines, and the other four, caught in ambushes, had bullet wounds in their upper body. Sometimes, I was told, the PIA planes are a quarter-full of badly wounded men. Clearly, it is too late to talk about the danger of war over Bangladesh. The Bengal war is now in full swing, with no end in sight. All that remains to be settled is who is silly enough to get involved in it. The parallels with Vietnam are the more striking the closer you look. The incoming PIA planes, for instance, now mostly bring soldiers, in uniform or plain clothes; but they also bring civilians, or people trying to pass for civilians, and the PIA stewards solemnly collect pistols and revolvers from them and return them at Dacca airport. The weapons themselves are a study in the grim comedy of “special warfare”; pearl- handled revolvers, nickelled automatics, and snub-nosed Bankers’ Specials as used by James Bond, Mafia hit men and CIA “contractors” in Vietnam.

The “civilians” joking with the soldiers guarding the airport as they wait for their sidearms to be returned are out of the same seamier Vietnam mould; heavily built bruiser types with gold rings, big moustaches and the thick- soled squeaking chappli sandals worn on the North-West Frontier. They collect their weapons, check that they are loaded, and slip them into holsters which bulge under their loose-hanging tropical shirts. Outside the air terminal they are picked up by men in smaller unconvincing civilian turnouts, sub-machine guns slung over their shoulders, and driven away in looted cars whose number-plates are covered with black paint.

There is a good reason why this sounds like a bad parody of Vietnam. These men belong to the Pakistan Special Forces, established by men who trained with the US Special Forces at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in the days when Pakistan was America’s “free-world” ally against Communist and Gary powers was flying over the Soviet Union from Peshawar. The Pakistan Special Forces are a rechciuffee of the American original, John Wayne in curry sauce, with 50 ten-man teams trained in sabotage, demolition, interrogation, assassination and other useful kinds of dirty work. Parachuted into the Indian-held part of Kashmir or slipping over the border, they triggered off the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, but totally failed to arouse the hoped-for Kashmir Insurrection.

Proudly wearing their jaunty green berets, they would, until a few months ago, show visitors to their camp at Cherat near Peshawar how they could climb ropes and correspond in secret inks. Now Cherat is empty; they are all in East Bengal. The fact that the US Special Forces, having been a costly flop in Vietnam, and having been closely associated with many of the nastiest and most counter-productive episodes of torture and assassination in all that ghastly war, were finally all withdrawn last year, has apparently not got through to the military chiefs here. The Pakistan Special Forces’ presence in East Bengal is a sure guarantee of more atrocities and ever- mounting resistance.

For, despite General Yahya Khan’s claim that the military situation in East Bengal is “under control”, the Pakistan army is in fact making feverish preparations to meet the guerrilla challenge which is growing every day. Two more divisions are being hastily raised in West Pakistan and the staff officers’ course at Quetta has been cut from two years to one to double the output of junior officers. But, in relation to the size of their problem, these reinforcements are chicken feed. All the requirements of text-book guerrilla warfare are present in Bengal; a 1,500 mile border with India, almost all river, swamp, jungle or rice paddy; sanctuaries on the other side defended by the Indian Army eager for a fight; and a civil population friendly to the guerrillas and physically easy to distinguish from the army of occupation. No Giap, Grivas or Guevara ever had it so good.

The signs of growing conflict are everywhere in East Pakistan: sandbagged strong-points at police stations, military posts and government offices, even the ones which issue driving licenses and rate demands. Soldiers standing by bridges, ferry crossings and railway junctions, or conducting meaningless “identity checks” at improvised road-blocks (I showed one soldier my driving license; he asked me to read it out to him). But this counter-insurgency network, already absorbing 80,000 men, is pitifully thin, even though Gen. Tikka Khan has had to strip the border with India of troops to sustain it (despite the proclaimed aim of defending East Pakistan against Indian invaders and infiltrators) and it is clear that East Bengal will soak up soldiers like blotting paper with no noticeable reduction in guerrilla activities.

The guerrilla have already scored successes which any Viet Cong commander would regard as a highly promising start to a protracted war. The East Pakistan tea industry has been brought to a halt; most of the Hindu tea pickers fled, the mainly British and West Pakistan tea estate managers have followed, and the remaining tea estates have ceased production after widespread guerrilla attacks destroyed the tea processing machinery. One stick of gelignite in the power plant brings a 5,000 acre of tea garden to a halt. It is almost ridiculously easy.

CRUDE TERRORISM AND PRIMITIVE PROPAGANDA

Such stocks of tea as were held in the gardens up country no longer move down the rivers to market; three weeks ago the only yard repairing river tug¬boats in all East Pakistan, the Pak Bay company plant near Dacca, was put out of action by a guerrilla-set fire. The jute and oil seed crops, the other mainstay of the economy, seem destined to join tea in the process of economic strangulation. Dozens of road and railway bridges have been blown, and hastily repaired, and will no doubt be blown again; and the boats, barges and slipways of the vital river communications system are even more vulnerable to guerrilla attack.

Nor is there necessarily a widespread and complex organization behind these attacks which General Tikka Khan and his Special Forces might be able to winkle out and disrupt; there are only a few hundred young Maoist in East Pakistan, but they now have tempting opportunities to kill landlords and moneylenders and sabotage mills and factories in a situation which is becoming every day more radicalised. The resort to violence on one side has inevitably brought out the men of violence on the other.

The absolute minimum hard core of guerrillas the Pakistan Army has to deal with is the 2,000 surviving mutineers from the East Bengal Regiment and East Pakistan Rifles now in India, trained and embittered soldiers. Even supposing no one joins them, a very modest 100 to 1 ratio will need at least 200,000 West Pakistan troops, with 1,000,000 a more realistic level (Colonel Grivas in Cyprus, never had more than 400 men able and ready to use a gun. He won). In counter-insurgency, the Pakistan Army had it all to learn; like most beginners, they have started with the least effective of all methods, crude terrorism. But the field where Pakistan even more desperately needs foreign advisers is that of propaganda. Somewhere, Goebels, Senator Joe McCarthy and even Horatio Bottomly must be shaking their heads sadly; at least, their stuff had a certain internal consistency and those who badly wanted to believe could do so without feeling that they were going out of their minds. The Pakistan propaganda effort is in contrast, clearly the work of untalented amateurs.

The operation is in the hands of Amanullah Sardar, a civil servant who was dragged away from his job as Chief Film Censor of Pakistan (“I used to make sure there was no kissing or Indian propaganda”) to take charge of the image-improving operation in Dacca. His boss is Lieut. General Farman, head of civil affairs in East Pakistan. Both give frequent Press conferences and are available for background briefing sessions, which are like playing chess with an opponent who loses his queen on the second move, snatching it back and indignantly continues the game. I take both of them to be fundamentally decent men, like many Americans I have met in Vietnam, caught up in a lunatic policy under the impression that they are doing their patriotic duty.

Sardar, the PR chief, has if anything the stickier wicket in play, as he has to meet the foreign Press face to face, on the basis that the Pakistan Government has nothing to hide, without a general’s stars or, it seems, any influence with the military whatever (He assured me, for instance, that I was free to photograph anything I liked. As I left Dacca an eager Customs man seized 31 unexposed films from my luggage. “Strict orders not to let journalists take any films out of the country,” he explained. “Doesn’t say here anything about exposed or unexposed”). The wretched Sardar faces the daunting task of convincing foreign reporters that the military regime has not, in fact, crushed a political party, the Awami League, which has just won an overwhelming vote in a free election, conducted by the regime itself. Even without documentary evidence, this would be hard sledding; but Sardar happens to be one of the authors of “Elections in the World’s Third Largest Democracy,” a persuasive booklet put out by his own department in Karachi last February.

“The elections had several unique features, quite apart from the obvious one where a military regime was surrendering power to a civilian government,” wrote the enthusiastic Sardar and his colleagues less than six months ago. “This itself is a dramatic reversal of the familiar pattern where the army usually takes over civilian regimes, snuffing out democratic liberties. President Yahya Khan kept faith with the people and fulfilled his promise to turn over the reins of office to a civilian democratic government voted into office in a free and fair election ... .” As I read this eloquent passage aloud, Sardar ran an anxious finger round the inside of his collar and smiled a strained smile, an unspoken appeal of “how-would-you-like-my-job?” - rather like the demeanour of a cancer researcher employed by a cigarette company. “But you must remember that the Awami League used Fascist terror tactics so that loyal people opposed to them were afraid to come to the polls and vote he explained. But it says on page 2 of ‘Elections in the Worlds’ Third Largest Democracy,’ ‘the turnout was large by any standard; around 60 per cent of the registered voters .....’ “The people were misled,” said Sardar earnestly. “They believed they were voting for reforms, not secession and treason.” But you write here, ‘the election results underlined the political maturity, sound common sense and the practicality of the average voter ... Parties preaching regionalism, tribalism and religious bigotry have been given short shrift.” “It was all part of the Indian plot,” said Sardar, barely getting the ball back over the net by a superhuman effort.
Even I was deceived. It shows the lengths these Hindus will go to ... .” But you say you are not conducting a campaign of persecution against Hindus .....“There is nothing wrong with the Hindus as long as they behave themselves. But when they try to destroy our dear homeland on the orders of their masters in India ... .”

Even this sad stuff, persecution denied in the language of pogrom, is comparatively rational when compared with the explanations which the government is offering its own people through the tightly controlled Pakistan Press. Everyone is plotting against Pakistan; the Indian are plotting with the British, the BBC is plotting with Zionists, the Russians are plotting with Israel (!), only China is standing loyally alongside Pakistan to defend Islam (!!!).

The Pakistan Army is, in fact, the courageous underdog, wrote Z. A. Suleri in the government controlled Pakistan Times last Sunday, tracing the basic source of the BBC-Zionist plot to “the historic conflict between Christendom and the world of Islam.” Suleri explains: “On the eve of the D. Day for UDI, nearly two lakh (200,000) armed personnel of the East Pakistan Rifles, the East Bengal Regiment and police stood at the beck and call of the Awami League and over and above the Indian infiltrators were poised for the kill .... Against the formidable array of these forces were only the few thousand men of 12 battalions .... To the band of defenders of national integrity applies the Churchillian description: ‘Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”’

The prospects of any negotiated settlement seem, I am afraid, to be zero. East Bengal is in south-east Asia, in its outlook; West Pakistan is in the Middle East. All they ever had in common was the shared consciousness of being part of the Muslim minority in India; exactly enough time has passed for a generation to emerge who cannot remember ever being Indians, with entirely predictable results. Islam, as a unifying force for Pakistan, is simply not a runner, any more than it is among the Arab countries of the Middle East.

A LAST, IRRATIONAL TURN OF THE SCREW

So both sides have reverted to local nationalism. In East Bengal, which has been ruled in turn by Hindus, Moguls, British and West Pakistanis, it is the ancient and irresistible cry of “out with the foreign oppressor.” Hatred of India has no part of this feeling; the Army-inspired “crush India” campaign in recent months has had no success in East Bengal. The foreign oppressor in East Pakistan is ...West Pakistan. But the conflict with India is the heart of West Pakistan nationalism, concentrated in the dream of expelling the Indians from Kashmir by force.

The Pakistanis were, in my view, in the right over Kashmir , as the ground rule stood in 1948; and it has been the Kashmir issue, built upon the recollection that Muslims once ruled all Hindustan, which generated the enormous West Pakistan army and bureaucratic establishment, which in turn need the taxes and foreign exchange from East Bengal to pay for it. In a last, irrational turn of the screw, the tribute from East Bengal is needed to maintain the army of occupation - to keep East Bengal to Pakistan so that the confrontation with India can be sustained. Every West Pakistani I talked to in East Bengal seemed mentally stalled in the hopeless closed circle of these emotions and arguments drawn from the trauma of partition, yet convinced that this was patriotic thinking.

The outlook of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League towards India was quite different. If tension with India was lowered, said the Sheikh, Pakistan would not need such a big army; trade with India could be resumed, and the resulting resources could be used to develop the economy. I don’t think the Sheikh cared very much whether East Bengal was in Pakistan or not (he certainly did not when I last talked to him, 18 months ago) but he cared very much that the future policies of Pakistan, or of an autonomous East Bengal, should be much more in the interests of Bengalis.

Big army, small army; crush India, improve relations with India; military power or economic growth: I don’t see how any compromise is possible on any of these fundamental issues. The final absurdity is that the Bengal war, which is now being fought to maintain Pakistan’s strength in the conflict with India, weakens it to vanishing point. There is every sign of a long and bloody war of attrition. The most probable ultimate result, for West Pakistan, is a Pakistan of 40 million people, confronting an India of 600 million, which would mean an end for all time to the dream of serious rivalry for Kashmir. It is this spectacle of people rushing into war for an aim which can never be achieved, even more than the aircraft full of wounded soldiers, which gave me the most haunting echoes of the murderous misunderstanding of Vietnam.