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Ali Bhutto, who had a brief interview with President Nixon last Saturday concerning "restoration of stability in South Asia," will return to Islamabad this week to head what Yahya said would be "a representative government." A dramatic, emotional orator who tearfully stalked out of the U.N. Security Council last week to protest its inaction on the war, Bhutto has recently made little secret of his displeasure with the military regime. "The people of Pakistan are angry," he fumed last week. "The generals have messed up the land."
Yahya's overconfidence had undoubtedly been fed by the outcome of the two nations' previous tangles, all of them inconclusive territorial disputes that altered little and allowed both sides to claim victory. This time, though, the Indians felt they were fighting for a moral cause. Pakistan's army in the East, moreover, was cut off by Indian air and naval superiority from the West, and had to contend with a hostile local population as well as the combined forces of the tough Mukti Bahini guerrillas and a numerically superior and better-equipped Indian army. Despite the brief duration of the war, the fighting was fierce. The Indians alone reported 10,633 casualties—2,307 killed, 6,163 wounded, 2,163 missing in action. Pakistan's casualties, not yet announced, are believed to be much higher, and there are no figures at all for guerrilla losses.
Battle of the Tanks. India also claims to have destroyed 244 Pakistani tanks, against a loss of 73 of its own. No fewer than 60 tanks—45 of Pakistan's, 15 of India's—were knocked out in the last day of the war in a fierce struggle that raged for more than 24 hours. The incident took place on the Punjabi plains, where the Indians tried to draw the Pakistanis out of the town of Shakargarh (meaning "the place of sugar"), in order to attack the important Pakistani military garrison of Sialkot.
In the East, Indian troops skirted cities and villages whenever possible in order to avoid civilian casualties, a strategy that also scattered the demoralized Pakistani forces and led to their defeat. After the signing of the surrender, a military spokesman in New Delhi announced triumphantly: "Not a single individual was killed in Dacca after the surrender." Unhappily, that turned out not to be true. One report said that Bengali guerrillas had executed more than 400 razakars, members of the West Pakistani army's much-hated local militia.
Although General Aurora was firm in his insistence that the Mukti Bahini disarm, it was unlikely that the bloodshed could be totally halted for some time. The new government of Bangladesh, if only to satisfy public opinion, will almost certainly hold a number of war-crimes trials of captured members of the former East Pakistan government. Potentially the most explosive situation is the Bengali desire for vengeance against the 1,500,000 Biharis—non-Bengali Moslems living in East Pakistan, many of whom are suspected of collaborating with the Pakistani army. In some villages, the Biharis have been locked in jails for their own protection. In an unusual conciliatory gesture, Aurora permitted Pakistani soldiers to keep their weapons until they had reached prison camps. He explained: "You have to see the bitterness in Dacca to believe it."