The World: The U.S.: A Policy in Shambles

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THE Nixon Administration drew a fusillade of criticism last week for its policy on India and Pakistan. Two weeks ago, when war broke out between the two traditional enemies, a State Department spokesman issued an unusually blunt statement, placing the burden of blame on India. Soon after that, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations George Bush branded the Indian action as "aggression"—a word that Washington subsequently but lamely explained had not been "authorized."

Senator Edward Kennedy declared that the Administration had turned a deaf ear for eight months to "the brutal and systematic repression of East Bengal by the Pakistani army," and now was condemning "the response of India toward an increasingly desperate situation on its eastern borders." Senators Edmund Muskie and Hubert Humphrey echoed Kennedy's charges.

The critics were by no means limited to ambitious politicians. In the New York Times, John P. Lewis, onetime U.S. A.I.D. director in India (1964-69) and now dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton, wrote: "We have managed to align ourselves with the wrong side of about as big and simple a moral issue as the world has seen lately; and we have sided with a minor military dictatorship against the world's second largest nation." In Britain, the conservative London Daily Telegraph accused Washington of "a blundering diplomatic performance which can have few parallels."

Since March, when the Pakistani army staged a bloody crackdown in East Bengal, murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians and prompting 10 million Bengalis to flee across the Indian border, the U.S. has been ostentatiously mild in its public criticism of the atrocities and of Pakistan's military ruler, President Yahya Khan—a man whom President Nixon likes. Washington wanted to retain whatever leverage it had with the Pakistanis. Moreover the Administration was grateful for Islamabad's help in arranging Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger's first, secret trip to China last July. India was shaken by Washington's sudden gesture toward its traditional enemies, the Chinese, with whom it had fought a brief war in 1962. Behind the scenes, many State Department officials urged in vain that the Government take a harder line toward Yahya, for humanitarian as well as practical political reasons.

In the past five years, China has displaced the U.S. as Pakistan's chief sponsor. India, increasingly dependent on the Soviet Union for military aid, finally signed an important treaty of friendship with Moscow last summer. The U.S. was not solely responsible for driving the Indians into the Soviet camp; but its policy of not being beastly to Yahya convinced the Indians that they could not count on the U.S. for moral support. The result of the treaty: U.S. influence in India was virtually neutralized.