1971-03-26
By Tillman Durdin
Page: 2
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan, March 25—An American newly arrived in Pakistan might have been surprised by the speech of a right‐wing Pakistani politician at a Karachi rally Monday claiming that the United States Central Intelligence Agency, Premier Golda Meir of Israel and Indian officials had teamed up “to divide Pakistan under the patronage of the United States of America.
To Americans resident in Pakistan, and particularly American officials, such allegations elicit only a weary shrug.
During the last year hardly a day has passed without some politician or publication accusing Americans in Pakistan of activity damaging to Moslem Pakistan or to Moslems else where around the world.
The attacks reflect the simmering acerbity that marks relationships between the United States and Pakistan, which were the warmest of allies against Communist expansionism in the nineteen‐fifties.
Much of Pakistan's bitterness seems to stein from the United States failure to support Pakistan in the 1965 war with India and from the stopping of military supplies to both countries at that time.
Pakistan expected a renewal of those supplies and other favors when Mr. Nixon, who was Vice President under President Eisenhower during the congenial nineteen‐fifties, took office. But these expectations have not been fulfilled.
United States economic aid to Pakistan, now about $200‐ million a year, is regularly described as a stratagem to secure United States domination of Pakistan or to undermine her security.
A letter to the editor in a Karachi paper the other day depicted Americans in Pakistan listening to radio broadcasts of the Muhammad Ali‐Joe Frazier boxing match and gloating over Ali's defeat because he is a Moslem.
A common charge is that the United States, which, is on record as favoring the continued unity of Pakistan, is behind the present campaign for self‐determination in East Pakistan. The United States Ambassador, Joseph S. Farland, who paid a routine visit to Sheik Mujibur Rahman, the East Pakistani leader, in Dacca on his way from here to Bangkok last month for medical treatment, has been depicted as the mastermind.
One story that recently spread through the country was that the United States Sixth Fleet, still reliably reported to be in the Mediterranean monitoring Soviet naval strength, had arrived in the Bay of Ben gal, to assert a long‐standing United States claim to a naval base there.
Ambassador Farland is regularly portrayed as a C.I.A. agent subverting Pakistan's interests —often in favor of India. As proof that he and other Americans in Pakistan being to the C.I.A., Pakistanis cite an East German publication which purports to list American agents.
The embassy here and the United States Consulate in Karachi have gone to elaborate lengths to refute statements made about the United States and Mr. Farland but with no great success.
“The press prints the denials,” said John McCarthy, press attache in Karachi, “but the next week politicians make the false charges again and the press dutifully records what was said.”
The attacks come not only from right‐wing orthodox Moslem politicians but also from the left. Leaders of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's leftist Pakistan People's Party, though not Mr. Bhutto himself, have regularly attacked Ambassador Farland.
So seemingly with considerable official sanction the at tacks go on, now virtually a permanent part of the Pakistan situation.