WASHINGTON POST, JULY 30, 1971
Editorial
A PROPOSAL ON PAKISTAN
In Pakistan the world is witnessing a holocaust unmatched since Hitler and “witnessing” the operative word. While hundreds of thousands have died and millions have fled, the world has done little but look on in paralyzed horror, sighing for the victims and offering the survivors among them alms but taking no effective measures to ameliorate even the incontrovertibly international aspect of the tragedy: the forced flight of terrorized Pakistan refugees to India. After the catastrophe of the Nigerian civil war, one might have hoped the international community would have been prepared in mental outlook, any way to prevent a repetition of it. But no.
The great nations with an interest in the sub-continent have been unwilling to halt their separate routine quests for national advantage merely of the sake of reducing the toll of human misery. The Russians are. perhaps, the least to be blamed; they did not have an important position in Pakistan and they have used its agony merely to consolidate their position in India. The Chinese on the other hand, have adopted a policy of totally craven expediency. They have rejected the Bengalis’ cause of popular revolution against an unjust tyranny, and they have encouraged the oppression of the Bengalis by the Pakistani Government even to the point of offering to defend Pakistan against outside (meaning Indian) intervention.
The American policy is for Americans even more regrettable for “strategic” reasons, which come down to on more than an outmoded habit of military alliance with Pakistan’s the United States has kept up a flow of arms and has asked Congress for new economic- aid (so far denied) all this under the pro texts of gaining a friends leverage in order to steer the Pakistanis back on a moderate course.
There has not been a whit of evidence, however, that the Pakistanis have paid any heed to whatever American urgings may have been privately conveyed. On the contrary the outpouring of refugees continues, at upwards of 20,000 a day and the United States is widely blamed for facilitating it.
What are the alternatives? One is an India-Pakistani war. This is far from unlikely, in view of the domestic pressures upon both Governments. Pakistan’s policy of expelling its citizens across their border and India’s policy of aiding Bengali insurgency movement could provide the spark for broader hostilities at practically any moment. Such a war would add new dimensions of despair to the sub-continent and it would intensify the political play on the Moscow Peking-Washington triangle.
But as well, a war would give U-Thant and the international community which he represents, an opening to deal with the basic problem of Pakistani cruelty. Everyone can see the death by starvation or cholera, in whatever numbers, and perhaps the greatest trans-border migration of peoples in modern history, and the imminent threat of war. Yet none of these has been adequate to mobilize Mr. Thant and the United Nations. But if a few people of one nationality were shot by a few soldiers of another, then the Security Council presumably would meet and the whole ponderous apparatus of international conciliation and problem-muffling might grind into gear.
The other alternative, as we see it. can only come either from an immediate joint appeal to Pakistan by the United States, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China or from separate but parallel appeals from these three. They would have to ask and help Pakistan to lake the steps necessary to restore normal conditions, difficult indeed impossible as that task may seem now. The mechanics of American-SovietChinese pressure are hard for an outsider to imagine (hard for an insider, too, no doubt). Yet it is plain that together the three countries, and only they, have the requisite influence to induce Pakistan to change the course, and the problem is to find a way to bring it to bear.
There are. of course, a dozen reasons diplomats and politicians can give you why such a proposal is unrealistic, unworkable. Basically, it would require three extremely wary mutual rivals to collaborate, as they have never done, and to collaborate in an important arena of their rivalry. The argument for trying out the proposal though, is quite simple; it could spare 10 or 20 or 80 million people terrible additional suffering, not to say for many of them their lives. Forlorn or visionary as it truly be, on possibility for limiting the effects of the Pakistani tragedy ought to be abandoned out of hand. And if the United States is not to make a real and positive contribution, then at the least it ought to end its current policy of aid, however limited, to Pakistan.