If Pakistan was disintegrating in division and violence, it had, in a sense, only moved full circle in its quarter-century history. For Pakistan emerged as a nation in 1947 out of divisions and strife. Propelled by Mohammad Ali Jinnah's driving vision of a Moslem homeland in South Asia, Pakistan was assembled from the predominantly Moslem arcas of British India. But the partitioning of India touched off a six-month bloodbath between Hindus and Moslems in which an estimated half million people perished. And it created a Pakistan with two distant wings separated by 1.100 miles of Indian Territory.
This geographical handicap was serious enough. But to further complicate matters, their shared devotion to Islam is virtually all that the two sectors of Pakistan have in common. West Pakistan is a land of desert and mountains and a generally and climate: the far more densely populated eastern wing is a humid land of jungles and alluvial plains. And the differences racial personality between the Punjabis of West Pakistan and the Bengalis of the East are extreme. Proud, martial person, the Punjab is look down upon the Bengalis and over the years have consistently exploited their countrymen in the east.
Clean Sweep
Ironically, President Yahya was the first West Pakistani leader to openly admit that East Pakistan had never received its fair share of political power and economic resources in the Pakistani union. To rectify matters, Yahya provided Pakistan with its first national elections conducted strictly on a one-man, one-vote basis. But the results of last December's voting turned out to be something of a shocker. In the east, Mujib's Awami League all but swept the boards clean. And because the more populous cast had a larger allotment of seats in the National Assembly, Mujib's forces came up with a clear parliamentary majority as well.
During the campaign, Mujib proclaimed a six-point programme aimed at diminishing the powers of Pakistan's central government while granting virtual autonomy to each province. Not surprisingly, it was a plan that the top vote-getting politician in West Pakistan, the mercurial, left leaning ex-Foreign Minister, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, found totally unacceptable. When Bhutto's supporters refused to take part in the new National Assembly, Yahya was forced to postpone its opening. This, in turn, prompted Mujib to launch a civil- disobedience campaign which virtually destroyed federal authority in East Pakistan and made him the region's effective ruler. And in the end that left Yahya no choice but to grant the Bengali demands or to resort to force.
In branding Mujib an outlaw, Yahya slammed shut the door to further negotiations and opted instead for a military solution to his dilemma. But although the federal force in East Pakistan (whose size is variously estimated at anywhere from 20.000 to 70,000 men) was far superior in training and equipment to its enemy, it faced some severe problems. Lacking direct land links between West and East Pakistan, and banned from flying over India, federal army commanders had to move their men the long way around the southern tip of India by way of Ceylon. “For the short term,” said a U.S. Analyst “Pakistan's army should be able to tear hell out of the Bengali landscape. But for the long term, they have terrible logistic problems."
