ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH. AUGUST 1, 1971
OBLIGATIONS IN PAKISTAN
“It is the most incredible, calculated thing since the days of the Nazis in Poland,” reports a high United States official on the situation in East Pakistan. The statistics are staggering: At least 200,000 and possibly as many as 700,000 dead; more than 6,500,000 refugees in India, with additional millions displaced within East Pakistan; more than 50,000 a day still crossing into India; thousands still dying, the victims of hunger, disease and the Bayonets of the West Pakistan army.
This has been going on four months, since the military forces of the dominant Western portion of the divided country moved with weapons, supplied over the years by the United States, to crush an uprising in the East. At first the rebels wanted little more than fair representation in the government. Now there is growing guerrilla resistance, with apparent help for the rebels by India and there is increasing doubt whether Pakistan can ever be reunited. It may be that in the end the Bengalis of East Pakistan and India will together create a new stale of “Bangladesh”.
The role of the United States in this Asian crisis leaves much to be desired, to say the least. As one observer put it, the U.S. seems to be doing enough to earn the enmity of the Bangalis but not enough to win West Pakistan’s friendship. This is the result of a policy of equivocation by which we castigate the West Pakistanis for what they are doing in the East, withhold economic assistance even while the country is starving, and continue to send arms to the central government on the perverted assumption that it is in this country’s “strategic interests” to do so.
If strategic interests are of primary concern, then the lop priority is to bring the conflict to an end and to divert Washington’s resources toward reconstruction of East Pakistan. Only destructive purposes will be served by continued dispatch of arms. Washington’s excuse that the shipments (not actually on a decisive scale) are no more than fulfilling terms of agreements made between Pakistan and the United States before the hostilities simply won’t stand up. As Senator Symington has said: “We have continued these shipments not because we were powerless to stop them, but because we decided not to stop them.” The U.S. must decide otherwise.
The human misery being chronicled in the American press is a reminder that, contrary to Santayana’s warning, man does not have to forget history in order to repeat it Most of the world remembers the silence while millions of civilians perished at the hands of the Nazis. There was the excuse that no one knew what was going on in the concentration camps. The slaughter and torment of the East Pakistanis may not be comparable to the systematic extermination of the Jews, but it is bad enough. And no one can say, “I didn’t know.”
It seems to us the United States is obligated to give a great deal more assistance to the unfortunates in East Pakistan and across the border in India, and to insist that the West Pakistan army withdraw from the East. It is too late for constructive measures that could have been taken weeks ago; it may even be too late to prevent the conflict from developing into a wider struggle. But it surely cannot be too late to help the miserable.
(St. Louis Post-Dispatch-August I. 1971)