There is no mourning officially, not for the slaughter of a pro-Pakistan community.

Every December, a thin slice of English-language Pakistan performs the same liturgy about 1971, the same small drama: military failure, political mismanagement in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, India's intervention, the birth of Bangladesh. The stranded, stateless Bihari issue rarely gets a line.

How has this ritual remained so unchanged: the same debate restaged every year, on schedule, and mistaken for reckoning? Too little attention goes to how the crisis was shaped by outside powers, and how those calculations left a population's devastation largely unnoticed.

Today, I want to try the register of international relations: dispassionate, treaty-and-cable analysis, the great-power view from above. I have my reservations about that dispassion. As the old description of economists goes, they know the price of everything and the value of nothing. But feeling something about a fifty-five-year injustice is not a flaw, even in an argument built from declassified cables and treaty dates. Both can be true in the same piece.

The US State Department's own historical account of the period is instructive because it is unsentimental: 1971 appears not as moral drama but as a crisis Washington managed around its other priorities. After East Pakistanis overwhelmingly voted for the autonomy-seeking Awami League in the 1970 elections, Pakistan's government blocked it from governing and jailed its leader, Sheikh Mujib, a name the State Department's own retrospective leaves........

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