পাতা:বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্র (চতুর্দশ খণ্ড).pdf/৪৭৩

এই পাতাটির মুদ্রণ সংশোধন করা প্রয়োজন।

441 বাংলাদেশের স্বাধীনতা যুদ্ধ দলিলপত্রঃ চতুর্দশ খন্ড শিরোনাম সূত্র তারিখ ১৭৮ সাত কোটি মানুষের যুদ্ধ সানডে টাইমস ১২ ডিসেম্বর, ১৯৭১ SUNDAY TIMES, DECEMBER 12, 1971 PAKISTAN GAMBLE THAT FAILED THE WAR OF THE 700 MILLION Sunday Times reporters" at the bloody birth of Bangladesh ᎠᎪY 1 From the front row of the stalls. Sayle was watching the curtain rise on the third, decisive act of a tragedy which has been in the making since partition in 1947. The first act was the Pakistan Army's repression of Bengali nationalism, beginning on March 25. The second act started on November 22, when the Indian Army first openly intervened in East Bengal on the side of the Mukti Bahini guerrillas. The third act was general war, all out and on all fronts. Two countries with a combined population of 685 million people are fighting from the foothills of the Karakorums to the Great Indian Desert, and from the irrigated farmlands of the Indus headwaters to the waterlogged islands at the mouth of the Ganges. With increasing urgency over the past few weeks, Murray Sayle reports from Rawalpindi. General Yahya Khan has been urged by many of the officers in his inner circle to lake some of the Indian pressure of East Pakistan with a series of blows in the West. The Pakistani commander in the East, Lt-Gen Amin Abdullah Khan Niazi was told that he had to keep the Mukti Bahini guerrillas in check until mid-February. By that lime, the beginning of the rainy seasons would swell the rivers and give his soldiers some protection. By that time, too Niazi was told, some sort of political compromise would have been reached so that the guerrillas would begin to lose their support in the countryside. There was, as we shall see, some foundation for this last hope; though in the end it proved to be based on a miscalculation. Niazi was told he could expect no reinforcements, and he was given enough supplies and ammunition to last until, mid-February. But his orders were based on the assumption that the Indians would limit themselves to shelling across the border and to supporting the guerrillas. But the Indians stepped up the pressure and from November 22 openly joined in the fighting. The only way the outnumbered Pakistanis could hold them was by laying down curtains of fire, the most wasteful possible use of ammunition. On Wednesday. December 1 Niazi reported to Yahya Khan that his ammunition stocks would not last more than a week at the rate they were being used.

  • Henry Brandon, Nicholas Carroll, Edited by Godfrey Hodgson